WordPress Website Maintenance: Check 12 Points to Increase Performance

Everyone wants a well-performing website. But without taking proper care of your website, your website won’t perform well and will fail to meet both users’ and search engine expectations.

To be honest-

Website maintenance is an ongoing process. And you should perform website maintenance tasks regularly. Only through regular maintenance you can have a website that will perform in the long run.

An ideal website is a website which fulfil the users expectation.

In this blog, we’ll discuss things that you should work on for WordPress website maintenance. At the end of this article, you will understand why website maintenance is important and learn how to properly maintain a WordPress website by following 12 key points.

Let’s start with a simple question on why should you focus on website maintenance..

Why Should You Focus on Website Maintenance?

If you need a fast, secure, well-performing WordPress website, you have to focus on your website maintenance tasks. Without properly maintaining your website, you can not expect a better website. Even a better website helps to boost your online sales and business development. Regular WordPress website maintenance will help you –

• Improve website performance
• Ensure website security
• Know what you should do to develop your site
• Measure website content properly
• Get current & future pictures of your website
• Do better content marketing

12 Best Practices for A WordPress Website Maintenance

Now it’s time to talk about the 12 best practices of WordPress Website Maintenance. We divide these checklists into three parts weekly, monthly, and yearly. It’ll help you a lot to understand how your website does. And what necessary steps you need to take for making a better website.

Let’s get started.

Weekly WordPress Website Maintenance Tasks

Weekly website maintenance tasks that you should follow:

1. Visit Your Website At Least Once a Week

Without proper nurturing, your website won’t do well. That’s why you should check out your website on regular basis. Ideally, you should visit your site at least once each week and see how it is doing.

You should also collect your website data to measure the current data and predict the coming week’s data. Thus, you’ll get a proper picture of your website clearly.

2. Approve and Reply Comments

Comments are essential if you have blog posts on your website. When you are getting comments on your posts, it means users are finding your articles interesting. In addition, it also makes a positive impact on the search engine.

To further improve the interaction, whenever you get a comment on any post, you need to give a relevant reply which can start a discussion. It helps to build a relationship between your and website visits. You can do this work each week.

3. Updates (Core, Plugins, and Theme)

It’s essential to update your website theme, plugins, and WordPress version. It’ll keep your website refreshed with the latest technology. Besides, you’ll get the updated features of your current themes and plugins. What’s more, newer version often comes with advanced security features.

So, whenever you see an update notifications on your WordPress dashboard, you should opt in for that. It’s sufficient to do this weekly and make a backup of your website while doing it.

4. Test Key Forms and Features

Each website has forms or other features that have to work properly. If those fail to function, it’ll make a negative impact on your website, as your users will not be able to reach you. This will create trust issues from your user’s view.

To keep in mind, you need to check each of the forms and other necessary website features at least once a week.

5. Backup Your Website

Keeping website backed up is one of the major things you should focus on while maintaining your website. By backing up your website, you can easily secure your website content. Whenever you need to restore the previous version (i.e. if your website gets hacked) of your website, you can use this backup.

We recommend backup your website each week. There are lots of WordPress backup plugins out there. You can use at least one of them to make your website safe.

Monthly Website Maintenance Checklists

In addition to focusing on weekly website maintenance tasks, you should also focus on some things on monthly basis.

Here are some things you should check every month:

6. Check Google Search Console

Google Search Console is the most suitable tool to check your website. That’s why our recommendation is to check the Google Search Console at least once a month. In Google Search Console, you can find out user demographics and know which pages or posts on your site are getting traffic and which of your web content is suffering from performance.

You can also check your website crawled data and find the current website errors using Google Search Console. Most importantly, Google Search Console works as your website’s data storage, which you can use to further grow your website.

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7. Run Website Performance Tests

Everyone wants a high-performing website. Search engine also likes these types of website which loads fast and have a better user experience. That’s why you have to improve your website performance based on Google Core Web Vitals.

However, you should run your website speed or performance test each month. With that, you will be able ti see how your website performs and what steps you should take to improve website performance.

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8. Optimize Your Website Database

Database optimization is another important thing you should work on this issue each month. You will often find some unnecessary files in your website database. These types of files reduce your storage.

So you have to remove these files and optimize your database. It also improves your website performance.

9. Run a Security Scan

Everyone wants a well-secure website. Without proper security, your WordPress website will be hacked. However, a secure website improves the user experience of your website. Even the search engine recommends these types of websites to their users.

For this why, you should run a security scan of your website once a month. You can also try some of the WordPress security plugins for doing this job.

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10. Fix Broken Links or 404 Errors

WordPress website not loading issues or other website errors are the biggest challenges you may face while maintaining your site. Without wasting any time, you have to fix those errors. You need to fix the broken links of your site.

And update the 404 errors or other issues that make a negative impact on your website. You should work on these major issues each month.

Yearly WordPress Website Maintenance Tasks

Apart from your weekly and monthly website maintenance tasks, you will also have to focus on the yearly maintenance plan.

Here, we’ve shared the yearly website maintenance checklists for you:

11. Consider Whether You Need New Hosting or Not

Your website speed mostly depends on your web hosting. That’s why you have to update your hosting plan once a year. If you need, you can also consider the new hosting plan or associate with another hosting company. For WordPress, you should choose WordPress hosting.

Because this types of hosting plan come with tons of features that are highly compatible with WordPress website. There hundreds of your web hosting companies out there. We’ve reviewed some best web hosting providers. You can check them.

12. Audit Your Website Content

It’s essential to audit your entire website content once a year. By doing this, you can get a proper picture of your web content. It helps you to make a solid decision about which content you should work on and which one you need to update.

You can also make a proper plan on improving the website content using the audit data. So don’t waste your time and audit your website yearly. Here are some SEO tools that you can use to audit your site.

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Get Ready To Maintain Your WordPress Website in a Right Way

We hope that this blog will help you maintain your website well. In this blog, we’ve shared 12 evergreen WordPress website maintenance checklists that you should follow for routine maintenance of your website. We have also discussed the importance of website maintenance and why should you do it.

Now it’s time to work on maintaining your WordPress website well. Are you ready? Before you start, make sure that you make a solid plan of how you’ll perform the routine maintenance of the site weekly, monthly, and yearly. Then dive in according to the plan.

Please share this article on social channels if it helps. Also do let us know in the comment section about which website maintenance tasks you want to perform.