WordPress Maintenance Tasks & Checklist [Breakdown]

WordPress Website Maintenance ???? [2024]

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Key Takeaways

• WordPress Popularity: WordPress remains a top choice for bloggers and developers due to its user-friendly interface and vast theme selection.
• Importance of Maintenance: Regular WordPress maintenance can prevent increased page load times, security vulnerabilities, and loss in search engine rankings.
• Maintenance Frequency: Depending on the website’s traffic, maintenance tasks should be performed either quarterly or semi-annually.
• Essential WordPress Maintenance Tips:
  • Ensure site security by changing passwords and removing inactive administrators.
  • Conduct regular malware scans and check for broken links.
  • Optimize images and review on-site SEO elements.
  • Renew hosting and domains periodically.
  • Monitor site performance using tools like Google Analytics.
• WordPress Maintenance Mode: For high-traffic websites, activate maintenance mode when making significant changes to avoid disrupting the user experience.
• Daily Tasks: Monitor site uptime and take regular backups.
• Weekly Tasks: Moderate comments, update plugins/themes, and conduct malware scans.
• Monthly Tasks: Perform visual inspections across different browsers and verify backups.
• Quarterly Tasks: Change passwords, minimize admin users, and check for broken links.
• Yearly Tasks: Review the website’s about page, theme, plugins, and resolve any errors in webmaster tools.

Relevant Stats:

• WordPress powers over 40% of the web, emphasizing the importance of regular maintenance for such a widely used platform.
• Websites that undergo regular maintenance have a 30% better performance rate compared to those that don’t.

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One of the most used CMS platforms, WordPress is loved by all beginner bloggers and developers alike. Its popularity stems from the fact that it is easy to use, manage, and update.

It also has the widest range of themes that enables you to build any kind of blog/website you want as per your needs and requirements. It offers you an array of best WordPress security plugins, wordpress vulnerability scanners, SEO & Social media plugins and others that make it easy to add additional functionality to your website.

 WordPress Site Maintenance in 2024 – Why, When & How

Overlooking basic WordPress maintenance plan can have many unpleasant consequences:

• Increase in page loading time
• Poor site security
• Decreased user experience
• Loss in search engine rankings

Aside from that, regular WP maintenance is mandatory if you don’t want your website to look more chaotic and harder to use. It will help you to boost your site’s performance and functionality as well as fortify your website against hacking and other potential harms.

Thus, if you are using WordPress to power your website then here is a complete WordPress website maintenance guide that will show you exactly how to maintain your WordPress website effectively. Comprising of 50+ best practices, this guide comes in the form of an infographic given below.

Before we take a look at the infographic below, here are few ongoing WordPress maintenance tasks that you need to undertake on a DAILY, WEEKLY, MONTHLY, QUATERLY & YEARLY basis.

Maintenance for your WordPress sites can be broadly organised into a 6 main categories;

• Backups – Taking a backup of your WordPress site and database is of utmost importance. In the event of a server failure or a security breach, your business won’t suffer much if you have taken a back up. This includes taking a daily backup of your posts, pages, media files, etc.
• WordPress Core Updates – To ensure that your WordPress website is secure and performing optimally, regularly update your site to the latest version.
  ✅ WordPress plugins:
  ✅ WordPress theme
  ✅ WordPress widgets
  ✅ Content
• Plugin Maintenance
• Theme Maintenance
• Overall Site Health
• Content Health.

If you run a busy website with a lot of traffic, then every three months. For smaller websites with low traffic and content, you need to do these maintenance tasks every six months.

 WordPress Maintenance Tips:

✅ Make sure that your site is secure

-Change your passwords

-Remove inactive website administrators

– Conduct a malware scan

✅ Check for broken links on your website pages
✅ Check your social media links
✅ Conduct a full website audit
✅ Test for browser and device compatibility of your website
✅ Use fresh, optimized images
✅ Review Google Analytics and check Google Console tools
✅ Review meta title, meta description tags, and your on-site SEO
✅ Disable trackbacks and ping backs
✅ Disable the ‘Debug Mode’
✅ Renew hosting and domains
✅ Increase the memory limit
✅ Check the Ads on your website [Also read – Google Ads Disapproved Due To Malicious or Unwanted Software ]
✅ Scan your site using our free online wordpress malware scanner

If you want to know how your site is performing, and how secure it is, running the site through our WordPress malware scanner. This way youcan be able to find out in case your website is infected with any of these following hacks such as WordPress Brute Force Attack, WordPress .htaccess hack, WordPress DDoS Attack, IndoXploit WordPress Hack and many more.

WP Maintenance Mode

☝️Important Note: If your website is high on traffic and is very popular, you must make sure to put your WordPress website on Maintenance mode by simply putting up a page that says “Our site is going through Maintenance”? 

WordPress Maintenance mode is ideal for a wide range of situations, including:

• When you are switching website themes
• While testing plugins,
• When fixing other website database problems,
• While making minor UI/UX tweaks.

Activating maintenance mode means that you can work on your website behind closed doors.

? Daily WordPress Site Maintenance Checklist

1. Uptime. – In general, a site’s uptime is the time for which a website appears to be working for the users. Like any website provider, it is essential to keep your website’s uptime as high as possible. Therefore, make it a daily habit to visit your website and stay sure it is working fine. for this purpose, you can also use monitoring services like Uptime Robot, WordPress Monitoring Plugin & many more wordpress monitoring plugins. To stay updated, the more effective method is to enable SMS notifications from these services.
2. Take Regular Backups –  It is strictly recommended for every WordPress user to keep an offsite backup of the WordPress files and database. WordPress has offered a number of backup plugins that automatically backup your website on a regular basis. You can use plugins like BackUpWordPress, Backup to Dropbox or BackupBuddy
3. Daily security report. Use a website security monitoring service (like WP Hacked Help) to email you a security report, and send notifications when something suspicious occurs. Check the reports, and act immediately when necessary.

? Related Read – Virtual Hardening & WAF – How Does It Hardens WordPress?

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? Weekly WP Maintenance Checklist

1. Comment moderation. This is an important task to be taken care of every week. If there are any comments in the moderation queue, approve them. Keep a check on your spam list for false positives. In case it is a blogging website or service provider and, you receive a lot of comments, you should do this daily. Popular comment plugins are Akismet Anti-Spam, Comments – wpDiscuz, Disqus Comment System
2. Updates (Update/Delete WordPress Plugins and Themes) – Keeping your site’s themes and plugins up-to-date is important in order to protect your site from malicious hacks. Likewise, too many themes and plugins can affect your site’s speed. It is recommended that you check in with WordPress for updates and upgrades at least every three months, six months at the most. Check WordPress.org and Download WordPress for information on the latest WordPress Releases available.
3. Malware scan. Scan your WordPress site for any infected files or malware. In spite of the robust security framework that WordPress provides, there are still high chances of your site falling prey to attacks such as WordPress redirect hack, Japanese SEO spam, gibberish keywords hack. As such, to steer clear of these WordPress Vulnerabilities, monitoring your site daily is another task that you need to add to your website maintenance checklist.

? Related Read – 20 WordPress Security Tips To Secure Your Website

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? Monthly WordPress Maintenance Checklist

1. Visual inspection. Your website should be visually engaging and responsive so we advise all our readers to inspect your website on different platforms. Do this on web browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. This will monitor the problems with layout or formatting. Besides, check if your website is mobile-friendly.
2. Verify backups. To verify your WordPress site backup is a crucial step of maintenance for those who back up their site on a regular basis. Backup created can be partially or fully lost and even get damaged so if you verify the backup created at least once a month, it will protect the data for any urgency.
3. Analytics. Simply log into Google Analytics and review trends, referral paths, and user-flow data. Analyze how to use google analytics to improve your site.

? Related Read – 33 Best Free WordPress Security Plugins  [Updated List]

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? Quarterly WordPress Maintenance Tasks

1. Change passwords. – Use strong passwords that are too hard to guess. If you have a very common password, change now. Also, make other users change their passwords as well for security reasons, as weak passwords is one of the most common reasons for websites getting hacked.
2. Minimize admin users – it is important to understand that a hacked admin account can cause the worst damage to your website. Therefore, remove all unnecessary admins from your WordPress account. Only the relevant admins should have access to your site. Additionally, delete default wp admin username and restrict the access granted to an admin user depending upon requirements.
3. Delete unused plugins and themes – Deactivate all unnecessary plugins and themes as they increase the risk of vulnerabilities. Never remove the latest default WordPress theme.
4. Delete unnecessary files – Check for unnecessary files in your wp-content folder and browse through your Media Library. Remove any images, videos and audio files which you no longer require. For this purpose, you can use a plugin like Delete Not Used Image or Media Cleaner to automatically remove broken images. Perform a backup before deleting anything!
5. Check and Fix Broken Links – Too many dead links on your website can lead to penalization by Google as well as result in a higher bounce rate. Thus, it is important to check your entire site’s links (download links, social media & affiliate links etc) in order to enhance user experience. Dependent upon the site and number of links on your site, you should check your site for dead links every six months to a year. Use Dead Link Checker, Screaming Frog, Beam Us Up, or check under Crawl > Crawl Errors in Google Search Console. Once you have found a broken link, you can either correct, replace, or remove them. Done. Other tools include.
   • W3C free check link free utility
   • Any Browser’s Link Checker
   • Squarefree’s Bookmarklets – javascripts for checking links
6. Verify your contact form – It is essential that the contact form on your website is functioning properly. To make sure, send yourself a message using that form, and check whether you are getting it or not.
7. Optimize your database – It is always a good idea to keep your WP database optimized. Before you do so, delete, if any, draft posts in your database that are not to be published or will never finish. Empty your comment spam. Now, optimize the database. Plugins like WP-DBManager, WP-Optimize or WP Clean Up can be used to optimize the database. You can also optimize using the phpMyAdmin tool available in cPanel. It is the simplest way to update and optimize your WordPress database.
8. Check Your Site’s Speed – Google takes into account website speed when ranking a website. A sluggish page speed and load time can frustrate users, leading to higher bounce rate. Thus, testing your site’s speed is a maintenance task that you need to do on a regular basis. Use Pingdom or Google PageSpeed Insights to examine how fast your site loads.

? Related Read – How to Scan & Detect Malware in WordPress Themes (Plugins Included)

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?Yearly WordPress Maintenance Checklist

1. Review your About page.
2. Review your theme and plugins.
3. Review your site.
   
4. Webmaster tools – Log into Google Webmaster Tools and resolve any error messages.

These are the few tasks that you need to take care of when maintaining your WordPress website. There are a few others that you also need to do and as such, take a look at the WordPress maintenance infographic below to know what these are.

So keep on top of your maintenance. Do it regularly, and it won’t take long. Check it out!

WordPress Site Maintenance Calendar [FREE PDF DOWNLOAD]

? Related Read – 8 WordPress Vulnerabilities & How To Fix Them [AIO Guide]

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WordPress Site Maintenance Checklist 2024 [Infographic]

Infographic Credits: By the team at bigrockcoupon.in

WordPress Maintenance Support Services

By letting you take back your work-life balance, a WordPress maintenance support service could allow you to do all these things and more. WP Hacked Help optimizes your website security and performance by understanding your business goals. Spend time growing your business, not fixing issues with your website. Leave it to the experts at WP Hacked Help. Not only, we help make your website more secure and hack-proof, but we also provide website infrastructure solutions.

Also Read –

Cyber Security Incident Response Plan Template For WordPress

Website Defacement Attack – How To Fix [3-STEP Guide]

How To Install SSL Certificate On Your WordPress Site?

19 Best SaaS Security Tools for Your SaaS Application [2024]

Best Free Wordfence Alternative To Secure Website 2024

Best Free Sucuri Alternative To Secure Website in 2024

HTTP Status Codes: Full List of Error Codes + Guide [2024]

7 Best FTP Clients for WordPress Mac, Linux & Windows [2024]

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