WordPress Maintenance Tasks
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Updated:July 28, 2021
You can quickly install and set up the WordPress and then you can install the WordPress theme and plugin. In a couple of hours you can publish your website if you have a good background with WordPress.
When your business grows, the contents and functionality of your WordPress site also grows.
There is a point where you have to start maintenance of your WP site otherwise you will have to face a lot of problems, even you have to shut down your website too.
Now we will see what are these pain points in details.
To run your WordPress site you can run the following task routinely.
This is a daily task you should do and you can identify if there are any issues with your site.
You can check the
Google Analytics Tool
Google Search Console
Any other tools give you analytic data of your site
There will be a decline in traffic of your when there are issues with your website. So then you can attend to find out the issue and fix them quickly.
When you look at the above Google Search Console diagram you can realize the traffic drop after 3/27/21. This is due to something wrong with the website.
To identify these issues early, you have to check the analytics of your website daily.
Never accept WP default comments without moderation because you are going to get a lot of spam. Spammers use automatic software to post comments on WordPress sites.
In some websites, comments help to keep the user engagement and add some value to the on-page score.
You can moderate the comments daily and approve the real comments and put spams in the trash.
Comment moderation in a WordPress site is a daily task that you should spend some time during the day.
Content audit is the process of evaluating how your content is performing.
You can identify what content works for your WordPress business and what content are not working.
You have to look for all channels and get the values of key metrics.
Based on these metrics you can get more content to get more organic traffic and increase the engagement level of the users.
You use a simple content audit template to do the content audit of your WordPress business site.
This is the most important thing you have to pay attention to, in order to run your website smoothly.
You have to backup both WordPress code base and the WordPress database at regular frequency
Interval of the backup depends on how frequently you update your content.
Daily backing up your resources is recommended because failures can happen at any time.
You can keep the backup on the same server and keep another copy of the backup out of the server that your website is hosted. Because failure can happen anywhere, anytime.
You can use the backup manually, you can use the backup servers or you can use WordPress backup plugins.
You can use the backup services or backup plugins to get your website backup.
Cybersecurity is most important thing for your business because cyber-attack ruin your business and reputation.
WordPress is a target for security attacks because it is the most popular open-source content management system (CRM) and 40% of the internet is powered by WordPress.
WordPress users neglect the all basic things of WordPress security and cyber-criminals know all these things in detail.
That being said, a regular WordPress security scan is far less work than trying to repair a site after the damage has already been done.
Security scan reviews the files of WordPress and identifies the infected files and files that have been not updated.
WordPress security plugin can scan your website and find if the website has got any issues. Some WordPress hosting services also offer WP site scan feature. Security scan should be done at least once a week.
Some of the best WP security plugin
Do you know that 49.07% of the top 10,000 sites are not using the latest WordPress and version 33.58% of those sites are two updates behind?
Finally people blame security of the WordPress when their website is hacked.
Whenever you see an update on WordPress please update your WordPress but remember to take a backup before you update the new release.
Theme developers release the updates after every major release of WordPress. So you can update your theme also provided that you have not customized it.
But you have customized the child theme you can update only the parent theme
Sometimes themes may give some issues after updating the WordPress core files.
You follow the following best practices when you develop themes.
To run a successful WordPress business, you have to install a lot of plugins. When you have a lot of plugins inside your WordPress there is a high chance of getting hacked by cyber-criminals.
When a new WordPress core update is installed , plugins may stop working as expected.
To overcome these issues, you can update the plugins regularly.
Please do not forget to take a backup before you update the plugins.
Several factors can affect the performance of your WordPress site
You need regular maintenance to improve the performance of your website. Good technical knowledge is required to do manual optimization
But there are plugins available to improve the performance of your WordPress site, especially caching your content.
There are several good tools to test the performance of your website.
When users see “Page Not found” they will get annoyed and lose the trust on your Website and your business too. So find out the broken links and fix the immediately.
Broken links are not good for your SEO health.
You can use link analysis tool to find broken images and URL
This is a good tool to find broken link https://www.drlinkcheck.com
You can use the ScreamingFrog website crawler to get good report on your linking structure.
It is essential to monitor the ranking of your web pages because ranking is an early warning matric related to your revenue. You can observe how your SEO ranking changes and takes the necessary action to keep you getting steady organic traffic.
If you do not monitor your ranking and organic traffic volume you will not realize until you see a decline in your revenue.
You can use Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Ahref and SEMRUSH to monitor the organic position of your pages.
As the number of posts and pages are growing your database is also growing. You need to clean up and optimize your database to keep the performance level of your website.
You can do the database optimization manually and using plugins. If you are a WordPress developer you can use the manual method. If you do not know anything about PHP and MYSQL you can use the following plugins to optimize your database.
These plugins can delete some rows of the tables in your database so it is advisable to have a backup of your database and first test out these plugins on your staging server or development server.
If your database is in the 1-2 GB range you need Managed WordPress Hosting Service. You have to face a lot of problems if you plan to stay on shared hosting service providers.
Changing your password periodically is a good practice to protect your website from hackers. The most common WordPress hacking attempts are done by using stolen passwords. Make sure you use a strong password.
You can save your password in a safe password manager tool.
Do not use the default user name admin instead you use a different user name.
When it comes to WordPress you have to think seriously about the security. So you can take necessary action to prevent those security issues.
Select a hosting provider who can provide good security for your WordPress.
Please check what are the security features they provide your WordPress site and what are the versions of the server software.
Do they provide reliable backup and recovery?
You can limit the entry point of your theme so malicious person can not hack your site.
Configure your system to minimize the damage if something happens.
Plan for the recovery of your site if someone hacks your website. Your backup files are very important.
Protect your computer and browser from security vulnerabilities.
Install WordPress updates as soon as possible because WordPress is updated regularly to address new security issues that may arise.
Internal link is any link from one page on your website to another page on your website.
Internal links are very useful for your users and search engines because they can navigate to relevant pages to get more information.
The links inside your contents are called contextual links which point to related content.
Why internal links are important to Google?
Google cal follows links to find the content on your website and to rank this page in the search results
If one of your pages gets a large number of links from other pages, then, Google can recognize that this page is an important and high valued page.
You can use WordPress plugins to build internal links or you can use the manual method using content editor.
Some of the poplar internal link building tools:
When you have proper content starters and publish good content on your WordPress site your site will grow day by day with a lot of organic traffic
If you are getting more than 25000 visitors per month shared hosting is not going to work for you. You have to host your website on WP Managed Hosting Provider
When you move your site from one hosting provider to another hosting provider you have to deal with several issues. If you do not know technical know-how, it is better to get help from WP Support Service.
When you site grows and update the content there can be orphaned images. So you can run audit to find out orphaned images and images exceeding certain size limits from WordPress sites. Please remove all these image to improve the performance of your website.