Here are our most important WordPress maintenance tasks you should be doing regularly to ensure your site is healthy and running smoothly.
WordPress core, theme, and plugin updates
It’s important to stay on top of WordPress updates. Updates usually include security and performance improvements.
Using popular WordPress plugins and themes are recommended, and often release updates to stay on top of the latest coding standards and optimizations. Updating a plugin or even WordPress core isn’t overly complicated or time consuming that WordPress now offers automatic updates.
It may get complicated when sites are running multiple plugins, code customizations and configurations as there can be a lot of moving parts to a site and all live in harmony.
Website backups
Before making updates to your site, it’s wise to backup your site. Having regular updates of your website will give you peace of mind and also gives you the opportunity to restore your site without losing data should you need that.
A key to best practice is to have an offsite, daily backup. It’s great to have multiple locations where you have backups – in case one fails. Most hosting providers include automatic monthly backups, while this is fine for sites with less traffic more popular sites should have more frequent backups.
Our monthly WordPress Care Plans include automatic backups to Amazon S3 cloud servers in all of our packages as we know how crucial this is for businesses.
A great WordPress plugin to use for this is Updraft Plus which stores backups in the same directory as your site. There are options to back your files to Dropbox or something similar.
Comment moderation
It can be quite a bit of work to moderate spam comments. Bots often crawl websites looking for the “Hello World” post WordPress is included by default (and other posts) to try and spam links to dodgy sites. This can be automated to discard spam comments using Akismet by Automattic.
Regularly monitoring or automating spam removal comments is a great monthly task to do. If your site receives hundreds of comments, it may be difficult to maintain actual comments that are legitimate.
Link monitoring
Link monitoring is vital to SEO ranking and UX. Sometimes pages move or get deleted, causing links to break. Too many broken links will cause frustration to your visitors and ultimately affect your SEO ranking negatively.
It can be quite difficult to monitor all these links manually, a plugin like Broken Link Checker.
All these crucial areas of keeping a WordPress site running smoothly are included in our WordPress Care Plans should you need assistance in maintaining your WordPress site don’t hesitate to reach out to us.
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