Is your business dependent on your WordPress website? If so, you should make it your habit to maintain it regularly. Routine website maintenance is important for keeping your site updated, and it’s also not as time-consuming as it might seem. Au contraire, WordPress maintenance ensures the site is on top of its performance without wasting your time.
What tasks should you include in your regular maintenance? That is what we are here to tell you!
So, please turn on your WordPress maintenance mode, and let’s start.
Review security logs of your site
This task is important for a newbie; usually, inexperienced WordPress users don’t realize that their site is under-attack unless their rankings drop or their site starts to malfunction. In such a case, you should review your website’s error logs, security logs, and access logs for any unusual activity.
In addition, you can also add a ‘security audit’ plugin to enhance the site’s security.
Troubleshooting maintenance tasks
Generally, when running regular maintenance on WordPress, the normal function of the site is not disturbed, but there can sometimes be a little slow down or a plugin conflict. Therefore, one way to save you from losing traffic is to turn on the WordPress maintenance mode before running maintenance or perform the maintenance during low-traffic hours.
Fix broken links and 404 errors
While growing your website, you will find that some of your linked external sites got removed or moved to other locations. You might also encounter poorly formatted links, broken images, or misspellings of your internal links. All this can harm your site’s user engagement which you build with hard work.
Make it a habit to check all the spellings, links, and images on your WordPress website design to save your engagement.
Similarly, if a user misspells a link, WordPress will show them a ‘404 error’. Again, there is nothing wrong with them. However, if a page doesn’t exist on your website, it can be frustrating for the users and lead to low traffic.
Optimize your database
Almost all of your website’s data, like settings, comments, content, user information, etc., are saved on the WordPress database. With time, the database may collect useless data, increasing the backup size. If you ever have to restore all the data, it will take a lot of time.
Looking for a complete WordPress Maintenance Plan?
With all ThriveWP care plans, we include free migration, malware removal, daily/hourly backups, plugin theme and core updates, ongoing support and 24/7 security monitoring and firewall.
Optimizing your data frequently can declutter and defragment, giving you a lite and well-performing database.
Check and update all files.
WordPress provides built-in tools to help you with WordPress website design and manage all its updates like themes, core, and plugins. Therefore, ensure that you regularly update the latest version whenever possible. However, you can manually check the WordPress updates page if you miss an update. Also, always read the document before updating to check what the update is about.
Updates can often conflict with other plugins and themes, so it is crucial to know what the update is changing. Additionally, you should always take a backup before making any changes or updates. A WordPress maintenance service like ThriveWP can handle all of this for you.
Our verdict
WordPress is a very powerful system that provides you with an ideal platform to run your website. If you know how to use it properly, you can ace it by adding your images, content, or anything you like. However, once you build a website that your customers love, you must maintain the site to ensure it runs at its best for your visitors and security.
Hopefully, this article helped you learn about your site’s maintenance tasks.
