Most website owners think that once their site is up and running, there is nothing left to do. However, you still need to keep checking on the site so the site keeps running efficiently. There are several WordPress maintenance tasks you should be running on a regular basis whether it be daily, weekly or monthly.
Regular Backups
One if not the most important task would be to make sure you have regular backups running. Plugins like Backup Buddy and Updraft Plus will backup your website files and database and will copy the backup to a location of your choice. Backup Buddy is a paid plugin but Updraft Plus is free. Places you could copy the backup to are Google Drive, Dropbox and Amazon’s cloud storage.
You can also have the plugin keep the backup on the website but that is not recommended. If your site gets hacked, then hackers can get to your backup and hack those as well. How often you backup your site all depends on the type of site you have. If you have a site where the content doesn’t change a lot, you can get away with once a month. If you have a site where you have online sales and have transactions every day, then you will want to back up the database at least once a day if not a couple of times a day.
File updates
Developers make updates to their themes and plugins every day. Some of these changes could be to fix security issues so you need to make sure these changes get made on your site. These changes need to be made at least once a week for good WordPress maintenance. You can log into your WordPress dashboard and go to Updates and it will show you all of the themes and plugins that need to be updated as well if the core WordPress files need to be updated. Also, make sure you have good backups running before making these changes.
While checking for updates, if there are any plugins or themes installed on your website that are not being used, you should go in and delete them. Keeping these on your website also keeps them in your database and this can impact the performance of your site.
Kill the spam
You should also delete any spam comments that have been posted on your site. These comments can contain spam links that your visitors might click on and if your site contains these links, then search engines can lower your rankings in searches.
Change your password
One update that you should do once a year is to change your admin password. By changing your password regularly, you limit someone in trying to figure out your password by trying to login by guessing your password over and over again.
Security plugins can help with passwords also. They can review the passwords on the site and determine how strong they are and when the last time they were changed. If there are others who log in to your site and you see that their password is not very strong or hasn’t been changed in a while, you can force them to change it with the plugin.
Site down
One last thing you can do is to use a service like Uptime Robot to monitor if your site is online or not. If your site is not online, Uptime Robot will notify you that it is down and you can check and see what is causing the issue.
Your website is just like anything else and good WordPress maintenance is vital in keeping it running at peak efficiency. If you need help in running these tasks, reach out to us and we will be more than happy to help.
