Almost everything you own needs maintenance and your WordPress site isn’t any different – WordPress maintenance is a MUST. Not properly maintaining your site causes your site to slow down and in the worst case it becomes clunky or gets hacked.
Fortunately, our team can make maintaining your WordPress our worries. You can use our WordPress Maintenance Services to keep your site in great shape so it runs full-speed ahead. All of the WordPress tips are included in our maintenance plan, but if have the time to take care of the maintenance, please make sure to perform the tasks below each day or week at a minimum.
Take a look at your backups. If you only do one maintenance task, make sure you back up your site. Everything else is useless if you don’t have a backup you can rely on. This is easily accomplished by installing either the WP-DB backup plugin or the WordPress Backup plugin.
Make sure your plugins, themes, and core files are always up-to-date. WordPress is inherently secure, which is why so many of the biggest websites rely on it today. Even with having 25 members on WordPress’ security team plus others whom they collaborate with, it’s still vulnerable to attack. So, remain proactive by keeping all your files up-to-date. Don’t overlook even the smallest update.
When you first set up your WordPress database it was probably really neatly organized. Over time, it slowly grows less organized. This is because everyday you do some work on your site and this adds to the clutter and before you know it, things aren’t running as smoothly as they were in the past. You can clean this up and thus speed up your website. One of the best programs for doing this is WP-Optimize.
More than likely you receive your fair share of spam comments. While they’re automatically discarded after 30 days, you shouldn’t wait that long. Instead, try deleting them weekly.
When you write your blog posts inside of the WordPress editor, WordPress saves each post revision in your site’s database. Considering how many small edits you make per page or per post, this adds up quickly. Make sure you go into your database and delete these. Depending on how many of these you make per week, you may want to do this weekly.
Each time you remove something from your WordPress installation (e.g. a plugin), you’re deleting rows of information from your database, but your database retains the space those rows once occupied, causing what’s known as “table overload.” This grows with time and will slow down your website. Make sure you clean this up so you optimize your site monthly.
Clean up your internal link structure so your site is easy to crawl. This will really make the Google bot happy too. If you run a small site, this is relatively easy to do manually. However, with time your website will grow and you’ll no longer have the time or the patience to test each individual link yourself. Fortunately, there are programs available you can use to save time (and your sanity).
There really is so much to do you could spend all day cleaning up your WordPress site or hire an admin to take care of it for you. What if you don’t have the time or the money to spare, though? You’ll find our WordPress maintenance program a great value for you!
Doing these maintenance tasks will ensure you have a great, high-speed, WordPress site free of security hacks.
