10 Crucial Maintenance tasks for All WordPress Websites

Posted on February 7th, 2023

WordPress.org is a content management system (CMS) that enables you to create a website or blog from scratch or to improve an existing website. Millions of people worldwide use WordPress, including many large organisations, such as The Guardian, Forbes, and The New York Times. WordPress.org is free to use and constantly improved by a dedicated team of volunteers. It is one of the most popular CMSs in the world, powering over 35% of all websites. Since its inception in 2003, WordPress has become the market’s most popular website builder and content management system (CMS).

Why maintain a WordPress site?

Over 40% of the internet have chosen WordPress to power their website or blog. That’s because WordPress is easy to use yet highly customisable, making it the perfect platform for any site. But with great power comes great responsibility. As the largest self-hosted CMS in the world, WordPress websites are a prime target for hackers.

That’s why it’s essential to keep your WordPress site secure with regular updates and security plugins. By securing your WordPress website, you can rest assured that your place is safe from attacks. Not only will this give you peace of mind, but it will also help build trust with your visitors and customers.

A live website that is not maintained correctly can lead to problems. For example, if the site is not optimised for search engines, it might fall out of the top results when people search for it. If the site isn’t regularly updated, it might become outdated and lose relevance. And if the site doesn’t have a secure connection, hackers could easily steal users’ personal information.

Here, We will learn some essential steps and tasks to keep our website clean, secure, and maintained. This article contains tutorials that allow you to complete the tasks on your websites.

To ensure that each live website is error-free and maintained, we have some checks that we can perform effortlessly. There are two types of maintenance tasks which are divided by their importance. Some tasks are critical and needy, so we must complete them monthly. But some of them are less important but essential. Let’s take a look at both types of Maintenance tasks.

Monthly Maintenance

These are the cricital maintenance checks and tasks for a typical WordPress site. You should follow these maintenance checks and tasks without miss.

• Check the Website’s Uptime: Uptime means when a website is accessible online. To check a website’s uptime, you can use an online service such as Pingdom or Uptime Robot. These online apps will help you to keep an eye on performance and downtime. Thes tools can notify you whenever an error occurs or the website is down and not accessible. It’s our responsibility to keep our website live and accessible.
• Check the Website’s Security: Security is essential for any website, mainly if it contains sensitive information such as customer data. You can use an online service such as Qualys SSL Labs or Symantec Website Security scan to check a website’s security. In the case of WordPress, you also have powerful security plugins, free and paid, which comes with extra security layers. These plugins include features like Firewall, two-factor authentication, Malware Scanners, and Notifications.
• Check the Website’s Performance: Performance refers to how quickly a website loads and responds to requests. To check a website’s performance, you can use an online service such as Google PageSpeed Insights or WebPageTest. These web tools provide the best results and summary about your websites. So we can make changes based on the results. These online tool results show the best and poor settings too. The results may also contain information about the websites and other errors.
• Check and Reset Broken Links: Broken links point to pages that no longer exist. To check for broken links on a website, you can use an online service such as Xenu Link Sleuth or Screaming Frog SEO Spider. The results come with detailed analytics of all the links available within the website. So we can quickly identify the broken links and change or remove them immediately.
• Run a Malware Scan: Malware is malicious software that can harm a website or visitors. To scan a website for malware, you can use an online service such as Sucuri SiteCheck or VirusTotal. As we discussed, we have dozens of Security plugins on the WordPress website that provide extra security layers. So, utilise your favourite WordPress security plugin to scan your site for malwares.

Every Three Month

Let’s discuss all the essential tasks related to website health and performance. We have some important basic maintenance tasks to keep your website clean, optimised, and attack-free. We also mentioned all the benefits of the specific job, so let’s dive in and secure our WordPress website.

• Create a Complete Backup: Backups are one of the essential parts of the website maintenance. We can solve many of the problems that occur on live websites. In the case of WordPress websites, we have many types of Backup plugins available in the WordPress Plugin Repository. All of these plugins come with different feature bundles and prices. Some of them are available for free also. We need to install one of the backup plugins like the Backup Buddy or UpdraftPlus plugin. These plugins will automate the process of backup for you. In case your website attends bad and unauthorised files or is corrupt, you have the option to restore the backup. You can even store them on cloud spaces like Google Drive, OneDrive, and DropBox to keep them safe.
• Update All WordPress Files: A WordPress website works with a combination of different files like WordPress Core, Plugins, and Theme files. A huge community of developers is working hard to solve the bugs and keep the software updated. The developers often provide updates with all the necessary security patches and the latest features. So, you need to update all the files to keep our website safe and optimised. WordPress has an inbuilt system that manages all the updates and provides the review that all the files are working with the latest version.
• Check for Spam Comments: One of the major issue you face in a WordPress site is spam comments submitted by grey or black hat SEOs. They insert spam comments on important pages of your websites which may contain hacking links and unauthorised files that try to access all secured files. To resolve the issues related to Spam Comments, we have many plugins like Akismet and Disable Spam Comments. These plugins are free and automatically remove all the specious IP Addresses and Comments. Once you find all the spam comments, we can easily delete them in one click.
• Check WordPress Security Logs: Many times, a website is under attack, and the owner does not even know about it. They know it when they feel that the website has become slow. In these types of cases, when attackers were trying to beat your website’s security silently. The security logs can capture it. Anyone with common sense can go through the Security Logs and differentiate the unusual activity. We have powerful security plugins that can notify you whenever unauthorised access occurs. But you don’t have any security plugins and think your website is slow or under attack. You should immediately go and check all the WordPress Security Logs. Using this method, we can easily identify the reason and block that specific IP or User.
• Compress Images: Images and Visual Elements takes more time to load on a website than text. More graphics can lead to slow speed, and slow websites take more time to rank on search engines. Search engines prefer fast and optimised websites, and people often close the window in case of waiting more than 3 seconds. We need to optimise each image and graphical element to solve the issue. You can use WP Optimise Plugin and configure it to auto-compress all the images. So, whenever your website finds an uncompressed image, it will immediately compress it. We can also use Image Optimisation with the Lazy Load feature to instantly increase speed and load content.

Conclusion

Maintaining a live website requires constant attention to detail and careful planning. But it’s worth the effort because a well-maintained live website can help your business grow and thrive. Live-optimized websites are essential for any business. It also means periodically updating the site with new content to keep visitors engaged. A good maintenance plan can help keep your site running and prevent any problems. It can also help keep your visitors happy by providing the content they want to see. By taking the time to maintain your website regularly, you will be able to ensure that your site remains reliable and secure for everyone who visits.