WordPress website maintenance is as important as its existence. In other words, if you have a WordPress website, you must make the necessary arrangements to maintain it regularly.
It’s even inevitable to maintain your WordPress website if you run an eCommerce store on it.
Although it’s not too difficult to manage & maintain a WordPress website, if you still can’t take the time to do it on your own, you can also hire a web developer to do it for you. A web developer can help you to update & upgrade your WordPress website regularly so that it works flawlessly, always.
In this blog post, I will be sharing 10 tips to maintain a WordPress website. If you are really keen to take over control of your website and manage it yourself, these tips will definitely help you.
Let’s start.
#1 Create a Backup Of Your WordPress Website
Before you continue maintaining your website by updating or upgrading any information, plugin, or theme, you must ensure that you have the latest backup with you.
After updating or upgrading your website, some of the features may suddenly stop working without you even noticing. Therefore, you must have the latest copy of the backup, just in case you need to restore and put your website back to normal.
#2 Update All The Passwords
This is the most important activity that you must do in order to maintain your website.
You must change the admin and FTP passwords of your website regularly in order to avoid the situations like website hacking or illegitimate accesses.
#3 Check & Delete Spam Comments
By using WordPress plugins like Akismet, you can ensure that you won’t receive any illegitimate comments however it is always suggested to keep an eye on the comments log so that you can make sure that you don’t miss any genuine comments too.
#4 Update All The Plugins
With the ever-changing web technologies, it is always advisable to update and upgrade all the plugins that you have been using with your WordPress website.
If you don’t update your plugins regularly, your WordPress website may become prone to malicious code injections.
#5 Update Your Theme
Similar to the WordPress plugins, its necessary to update your theme regularly. Whenever there is any change or update by your theme developer or development company, you must ensure to install the latest theme setup.
#6 Check All The Forms
If you have been using forms on your website to enable your customers to contact you, you must check regularly and ensure that all of your forms are working properly.
Why should you check your forms regularly?
Due to misconfiguration on your WordPress hosting server or your email service provider, sometimes your website forms may suddenly stop sending emails. Therefore, as a precautionary measure, you must check them frequently.
#7 Check Broken Links
Broken links are the links on your website that lead to nowhere. In other words, the non-working links on your website are known as broken links.
Broken links affect both user’s experience & SEO credibility too. Therefore, if you want your website to rank in prominent positions in search engines and the ability for users to browse your website flawlessly, you must check and fix all the broken links on your website.
Fortunately, there are several great plugins available to check broken links on your website. One of them is Broken Link Checker.
#8 Run Performance Tests
Running frequent tests for diagnosing the website’s health/performance is also an essential part of website maintenance.
Again, there are several online tools like https://tools.pingdom.com which you can use and view how your website is performing in terms of download speed and what are issues you need to fix in order to improve your website performance.
#9 Optimize Images
Optimizing images to enhance the loading speed of your website is very important, especially if you have an eCommerce store because you may need to upload hundreds of high-resolution images of your products.
You can also use a plugin like Smush that will help you to optimize all of the images on your website and eventually improve the loading speed of your website.
#10 Secure Your WordPress Website
In order to protect your website from malicious codes and viruses, you must ensure that your WordPress website has all the security norms in place. You may like to read one of my previous blog posts on securing a WordPress website from hackers and malicious codes & follow the tips shared there.
