One of the most powerful and popular CMS, WordPress is a user-friendly platform on which to create a blog or a website.
WordPress is easy to use, update, manage and maintain. It offers tons of benefits and features along with WordPress plugins to extend the functionality of the website.
There are a wide variety of WordPress themes available for every type of business. What’s more, it also helps with content, SEO and social media, helping you build a successful website that yields greater results in the future.
However, just creating a beautiful website is not enough. You also need to take care of its daily upkeep and maintenance. This will ensure enhanced user experience, which will help boost your site’s ranking on the SERPs.
Thus, if you want to know how to maintain a WordPress website, then here are a few tasks to get you started.
How to Maintain a WordPress Website: Important Maintenance Tasks
1. Website Speed Audit
Poor website speed is the biggest turn-off for users. If your site takes an indefinite time to load, then it will affect your site’s traffic, leading to a higher bounce rate.
Checking your website speed frequently and optimizing it is one of the essential WordPress maintenance tasks. The best part – there are free tools available like GTmetrix that can help audit your website’s speed, while providing helpful suggestions on how to improve it.
2. Update WordPress Themes and Plugins
One of the biggest threats to your site’s security is un-updated plugins and themes. They leave your site open to malicious hacks and spam. Thus, updating them is important.
Also, delete unwanted themes and redundant plugins to improve your site’s speed.
3. Daily Security Monitoring and Backup
This is the most important WordPress website maintenance task that needs to be done daily. With an increase in online threats, protecting your website from hacking attempts, spam, malware, etc is important.
To protect your website, you can make use of various WordPress security plugins. Similarly, taking a daily backup of your website and database is essential; in the event, your website gets hacked or there is a server failure, you can easily restore your website without much hassle.
4. Updating Content and Checking Website Links
Updating older content on your website is important for online success. This includes updating information and images, checking internal/external links, fixing errors, meta tags, etc.
Fresh and updated content helps improve customer engagement, which in turn will drive more traffic and improve raking.
Likewise, check your website’s links. From contact form link and download links to affiliate links and more, all this should be a part of your daily website maintenance checklist.
5. Review on-page SEO Factors
On-page SEO factors include meta tags, alt text for images, checking keywords, H tags, removing thin pages and robot.txt, among others.
Reviewing these factors will help optimize your website for users as well as search engines. It will help improve website indexing and improve the user experience on your website.
Apart from these WordPress website maintenance tasks, there are others too that need to be done.
Thus, if you want to know what these are, then here is an in-depth WordPress maintenance checklist that you can check out: