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WordPress maintenance checklist: 13 key tasks to perform

Are you looking for a handy WordPress maintenance checklist that will help you keep things running smoothly? If so, you’re in the right place.

You can’t just create a website and call it a day. You need to ensure it works well if you want to offer a seamless experience to your visitors. Over time, you’ll need to do maintenance on your WordPress website so you offer each visitor the best experience possible. 

To make things easier, we have come up with a well-thought-out checklist for you, listing the key maintenance tasks to perform.

So, without further ado, let’s start.

The need for maintaining a WordPress site

WordPress is a leading content management system preferred by over 43% of website owners worldwide.

It’s a user-friendly platform for beginners that packs many customization options, making it easy for you to build a functional website for your target audience. However, timely maintenance is the key to leveraging the content management system to the fullest.

You may run into issues that may compromise the functionality of your website over time. So, maintaining it becomes necessary. Put plainly, it’s a process where you identify the problems that compromise user experience and devise viable solutions.

As time passes, your website may be susceptible to glitches or security vulnerabilities. Outdated plugins or poor-quality themes are one of the primary causes of this problem. 

However, it’s not the only reason that justifies timely website maintenance. You may want to optimize your WordPress site for better search engine performance and enhanced user experience.

You may also consider tailoring the content to the changing needs or preferences of the intended audience, incorporating interactive content to boost engagement, and optimizing the design elements for a better experience.

Website maintenance ensures that your visitors can navigate and access relevant information hitch-free through the platform, which fuels your lead generation and conversion process.

Key tasks to perform when maintaining a WordPress site

You may have to perform various tasks to keep your WordPress site up-to-date. Your goals may dictate which maintenance tasks you should tackle first. However, we have compiled a list of a few that you must always consider.

1. Explore your pages

One of the key tasks you should consider when maintaining your WordPress site is to explore your pages.

It’s not just about fixing bugs or resolving security problems. You should ensure that you help visitors find answers to their questions. So, when you explore your website pages, view them from visitors’ perspective and identify the room for improvement.

See if your content aligns with the needs or preferences of the intended audience and analyze the way you convey your message. Ensure the information is easy to understand, and look for things that can help you improve readability.

You’ll want to make sure the page serves the purpose you created it for, be it generating awareness or increasing conversions.

2. Review comments

Enabling comments on your website makes you susceptible to spam, bad publicity, and trolling. But you can’t just disable them and call it a day. 

Accepting comments from your audience helps you bond with them and ensure two-way communication. To deal with bad comments, you should consider comment moderation and allow only genuine ones.

An easy way of doing this is to leverage anti-spam or comment management plugins, such as WPForms, Akismet, Antispam Bee, and WP Armour. It helps you automate an otherwise tedious and time-consuming activity.

The only problem is that these tools may accidentally flag real comments as spam and end up not displaying them. With this in mind, it’s best that you periodically review your comments. It doesn’t matter whether you leverage a comment management solution.

3. Check for updates

It’s important to check for updates for your WordPress site if you wish to offer a seamless experience to your visitors.

Your content management system, plugins, or themes may announce periodic updates to keep up with bugs and security vulnerabilities. To ensure optimal performance of your website, you should keep everything up-to-date.

It’s also worth noting that staying up-to-date helps your site align with evolving web design trends. Regular updates often include enhancements that improve the visual appeal and usability of your website, keeping it fresh and competitive in today’s dynamic digital landscape.

Try not to delay things unnecessarily. Not only will it compromise user experience, but it also makes you vulnerable to hacking and unauthorized data access.

4. Test user experience

People visit your website to access the required information and learn about the solutions you offer. Their user experience encompasses all of the encounters with your brand throughout different touchpoints of the customer journey.

Your goal is to identify the drop-off points and minimize the friction to make sure that you engage the intended audience. Hence, it’s important to test the user experience you offer through your platform.

You must eliminate the roadblocks that prevent your visitors from accessing the required information through your platform or performing the desired actions.

5. Remove unwanted data from the database

Over time, your WordPress database may accumulate a lot of unnecessary data, which may affect its performance.

It makes maintaining your WordPress site a hassle. The size of your backup grows exponentially, which significantly affects the uploading, downloading, and restoring process.

Hence, we strongly recommend that you optimize your WordPress database and remove unnecessary data from time to time. Not only will it make website maintenance easy, but it also helps you offer an enhanced experience to your visitors.

6. Find 404 errors and set redirects

Even if you create interactive 404 pages to engage your visitors, encountering a 404 error is one of the most frustrating experiences when exploring a website to access information.

As time passes, you may realize that some of your website pages no longer serve the purpose you created them for.

There’s nothing wrong with removing unnecessary pages from your website from time to time. However, not setting redirects may lead to a poor user experience for your visitors.

Namecheap's 404 image

Hence, one of the key WordPress website maintenance tasks is to track unavailable pages and set redirects. You can leverage tools like All-in-One SEO, SeedProd, Redirection, and Custom 404 Pro to identify the 404 issues and set redirects with ease.

This strategy serves two purposes. First, it improves your user experience. Second, it prevents the loss of traffic since they’ll be redirected to a different page on your site.

7. Fix broken links

Leveraging external links is an excellent strategy for adding more depth to the content you publish on your website. It complements topical depth and enables you to facilitate your visitors’ access to useful information.

Over time, the pages you link to may no longer exist, which leads you to encounter broken link issues.

Broken link checker image

Source

The problem may also occur when you link to your content due to typographical errors or broken images. That’s why when conducting website maintenance, you must look for broken links and fix them. Replacing them with the links that work helps, or you can consider removing them entirely.

8. Optimize your content for search engines

Another key task you should perform when maintaining your WordPress website is optimizing your content for better search engine performance.

The needs or preferences of your audience may change over time. The keywords you targeted may no longer be relevant. We also witness search engine algorithm updates now and then, which usually means we need to revisit our content strategy.

Google's Infographic for optimizing content

Source

Obsolescence also plays a major role. Plus, we see the rise and fall of the trends in our respective industries. All these factors affect the performance of your content and have a significant impact on your search engine visibility.

Hence, it’s critical to optimize your content as per the latest best practices to climb the SERPs consistently. You can consider leveraging tools like Search Console, All-in-One SEO, LowFruits, SEOBoost, Yoast SEO, and Rank Math to improve your website’s search engine performance. 

9. Optimize your images

Leveraging visual content is one of the best ways to convey your message and engage visitors on your site. However, you must ensure that images on your website are optimized properly.

Unoptimized images may compromise the user experience and your ability to engage the intended audience. Therefore, it’s best to review your images and optimize them from time to time.

You should reduce the size of your images without having to compromise the image quality. Plus, your image description or alternative text must align with relevant keywords.

Image optimization helps you free up storage, improve the load time of your pages, and benefit from Image Search.

10. Improve website performance

The load time of your pages significantly affects the performance of your WordPress site and compromises your ability to engage visitors. When your pages take forever to load and display useful information, your visitors may leave and consider other alternatives.

Chart showing how speed improves performance

Source

To prevent this, you should identify the causes that may lead to load time issues and decrease the performance of your site. There may be a number of factors that may come into play here, such as the use of heavy images, unclean code, abundant plugins, subpar hosting, and so on. 

Monitoring your website’s core web vitals and conducting speed tests can help you determine what’s wrong and correct it. It’s an essential task to perform during the maintenance phase. So, we suggest that you consider it a high priority and increase your website speed

11. Conduct a security audit

As discussed earlier, outdated plugins and unreliable themes are a few of the major causes that may lead to WordPress security issues. There may also be other reasons, such as poorly managed access permissions or weak passwords.

Security audit chart of password breaches

Source

Website security vulnerabilities leave you at the mercy of cybercriminals and increase the likelihood of malicious attacks. So, it’s best to conduct a security audit on a timely basis to identify potential issues and develop viable solutions.

12. Create a site backup

Another important maintenance task is to create a complete backup of your WordPress site periodically. 

Mishaps happen when you’re working on your website. You may accidentally do something you shouldn’t, which may lead to dire consequences. You may also lose your website data because of malicious cyber attacks.

Having a full backup of your website serves as the best course of action. If something bad happens, you don’t start with a blank canvas. You can easily restore all important information and minimize the likelihood of your hard work going in vain.

13. Change your password

Even if you have set a strong password for your WordPress site, it’s important to keep changing it over time. It minimizes the likelihood of hacking attempts and protects your information from unauthorized access.

It’s best that you change your admin panel password on a monthly basis. Plus, you should also consider limiting the number of login attempts. These are necessary measures that you should take to prevent brute force attacks and cope with cyber security threats.

Make sure that your password is strong and contains uppercase and lowercase letters. Plus, you should incorporate symbols and numbers to make it as unique as possible.

WordPress maintenance enhances the user experience

Maintaining your WordPress site improves its performance and enhances your ability to engage your target audience. When you offer a seamless experience to your visitors, it is easier for them to engage with your site and ultimately take action to become a customer.

Maintaining your WordPress site may not be as easy, especially when you have just started your entrepreneurial journey. However, it’s a necessary step for website owners and business leaders across all industries. 

We have come up with a list of necessary tasks you should consider if you want to maintain your WordPress site and offer the best experience possible to your visitors.

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