Have you ever wondered what WordPress maintenance tasks you should perform on a regular basis? After starting a blog, many times people don't do any maintenance unless something bad happens. By performing regular maintenance tasks, you can ensure that your WordPress site is always performing well.
In this tutorial, we'll share 9 crucial WordPress maintenance tasks that you need to perform on a regular basis, and how to do each of them.
Why and when to perform maintenance tasks on WordPress
Your WordPress site is a powerful system made up of several parts. This includes your accommodation WordPress, the wordpress software itself, plugins and themes.
In addition to this, you add your own content with text and images. Together, all create a website loved by your visitors and customers.
However, this system must be monitored to ensure optimal performance. There are few simple maintenance tasks that you can perform regularly to make sure your website is working properly.
How often do you need to perform WordPress maintenance tasks?
If you manage a website with a lot of traffic, every three months. For smaller websites with little traffic and content, you should perform these maintenance tasks every six months.
Now, it is said, let's detail the essential WordPress maintenance tasks you need to perform and how to perform them.
1 - Change all your WordPress passwords
Passwords are your first defense against unauthorized access to your website. You should always use strong, unique passwords for all of your online accounts, including your WordPress website, FTP accounts, and database.
However, even if you use strong passwords and they are compromised, you might not even notice it.
This is why WordPress security experts recommend changing your WordPress passwords regularly. This includes the passwords for your WordPress dashboard, FTP or SSH accounts, and your password to the WordPress database.
2 - Create a full backup of your website
Backups are one of the most important WordPress tools in your arsenal. There are many perfect WordPress backup plugins that can help you automate the backup process on WordPress completely.
However, sometimes your backup solution may stop working without you noticing it.
Occasionally, you need to manually run your backup plugin to create a full backup of your site. After running the backup, you should verify that your backup files are stored properly in your desired remote location (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.).
3 - Check and update all WordPress files
WordPress comes with a built-in system for managing updates to the system, plugins, and WordPress themes. You should always use the latest version of WordPress and update all your plugins and themes.
However, there are situations where you may miss an update. For example, when a premium tile or a theme's license has expired, and it failed to check for an update.
Go to the WordPress updates page to manually check for updates. Review all of your installed plugins and themes to make sure they are all up to date.
4 - Check and delete unwanted comments
If you use Akismet to fight spam on WordPress, this automatically reduces spam in your comment moderation queue.
However, sometimes Akismet can end up marking a legitimate comment as spam. From time to time you will need to quickly check the comments to make sure that there are no spam comments marked as legitimate.
If you have thousands of comments in the tab undesirable You need to use the bulk removal method that WordPress offers.
5 - Test all your WordPress forms
WordPress form creation plugins like WPForms simplify the form creation process.
However, due to the misconfiguration on your serveraccommodation WordPress or your email service provider, sometimes these forms may suddenly stop sending emails.
You will need to check all the forms on your website to make sure they are working properly. If a form doesn't work, check out our guide on how to solve the problem of sending email on WordPress.
6 - Optimize your WordPress database
WordPress stores most of the data in your WordPress database. It contains all your content, comments, users and settings.
This is the reason why your database can collect a lot of unnecessary data. This increases the size of WordPress backups that can affect download, and restore backups.
Optimizing your WordPress database allows you to clean up clutter, defragment tables, and improve database performance.
7 - run performance tests
Many users optimize the performance of WordPress when they are just starting out and break this habit. During this time, you keep adding new content, installing new plugins or even changing your theme. All of them can affect the performance of your WordPress site.
Faster websites are not only good for user experience, but they also improve their site's performance for search engines. That is why you should regularly perform a thorough analysis of your website.
When reviewing your site's performance, don't limit yourself to improving your homepage. Also test your most popular content and all your important pages.
8 - Find and fix 404 errors
When a user requests a page that does not exist on your website, WordPress will display a 404 error page.
404 errors that occur when a user has typed an address incorrectly are normal and nothing to worry about. However, 404 errors that occur because a page is no longer available can cause a poor user experience.
9 - Find and fix broken links
As your website grows, you will see that some external sites that you linked in your old articles no longer exist. Some may have moved to new servers, while others may just disappear.
The problem of broken links is not just limited to external links. You can accidentally add broken images, badly formatted links. This leads to a bad user experience and affects your site's bounce rate and page views.
You can use the plugin « Broken Link Checker To check for any broken links on your blog.
That's all for these recurring tasks of optimizing your blog. If you have practices that are not listed here, feel free to share them with us.
