Do you perform WordPress monthly maintenance? Have you planned any monthly strategy for WordPress maintenance?
Well, just having a WordPress website is not enough for your business to thrive. To drive conversions and sales, it’s crucial to focus on lead generation efforts.
Achieving this requires regular maintenance of your WordPress site, which can help optimize it for maximum performance and conversions.
Also, multiple technical glitches, security vulnerabilities, and slow loading times can drive visitors away and harm your brand’s reputation. Thus, it’s crucial to stay on top of your WordPress maintenance game.
Let us guide you through our monthly maintenance checklist recommended by experts. From updates to backups, we’ve got you covered.
8 Step Checklist for WordPress monthly maintenance
1. Website Backup
There are countless reasons why backups are essential, including security breaches, incompatible installs or updates, human error, and more. You never know what could result in a site halt, low speed or downtime.
Thus, it is important to save your website to a cloud to ensure that if something goes wrong, a relatively recent version will be available.
Luckily, there are amazing tools available such as UpdraftPlus, BlogVault, BackupBuddy, BackWPUp, WP Time Capsule, BoldGrid Total Upkeep and many others that allow automated backup for WordPress sites and make this a breeze.
So, without any more excuses, safeguard your site with backups and enjoy the bliss of worry-free website management!
2. Update Your Files
Keeping all components of your site updated ensures the security and optimum performance of your site. Updating a WordPress site is simple and can be done with a single click.
Just go to the Updates section in your WordPress dashboard, where you can quickly see the areas that need your attention. You can update them is just one click.
Moreover, updating themes and plugins can sometimes cause problems that directly impact the website’s functionality. Thus, it’s important to always backup your website before installing any updates.
Test updates in a staging environment before going live is a great idea. So, keep this in mind while updating your site.
3. Delete Unused Themes And Plugins
Outdated plugins and themes installed on your WordPress site only increase the risk of security breaches and vulnerabilities. So, when you maintain your website’s themes and plugins, it’s important to remove any that are no longer in use.
In addition to security, removing unused themes help in reducing complexity and confusion while other people work on your site. It also decreases the size of your backups.
4. Check Your Site Speed
Site speed is one of the crucial elements that can make or break your business. If your page takes more than 3 seconds to load, there are chances that your visitors will leave your site.
Slow loading speeds not only drive visitors to your competitors but negatively impact your brand’s reputation and harm your business’s bottom line.
Therefore, regularly testing your website’s loading speed and promptly addressing any issues you encounter is vital for maintaining a strong SEO ranking and retaining visitors.
You can make this process easier by using a variety of tools, including IsItWP and PageSpeed Insights, which offer comprehensive speed tests and performance recommendations.
5. Fix The Broken Links And 404s
When a user clicks on a link on your website, it is important that they are navigated to the right destination. If not, this can lead to a bad user-experience and also, negatively impact user engagement.
Two most common instances where this can occur is – when a user clicks on an internal link or enters an internal URL into the browser, but the browser cannot locate the intended page, leading to a 404 error.
Also, when content contains external links that cannot be found, referred to as broken links. You can find and fix these broken links to address this issue.
It is crucial to prioritize fixing broken links, as they can harm both user experience and SEO. Additionally, it’s important to address any 404 pages on your website, which can also have negative impacts. Fortunately, AIOSEO can assist in identifying and repairing 404 links.
6. Keep An Eye On The Internal Site Health Monitor
Including site health monitoring and security measures in your WordPress Monthly Maintenance Package can help ensure that your WordPress site stays up-to-date and secure.
Click Tools and then Site Health in your WordPress dashboard. This interface will draw your attention to security and performance issues and you need to take necessary measures to address them.
Using a top WordPress security plugin like Sucuri can also help enhance your site’s security by detecting and removing malware. It also helps to strengthen your login pages and protect your site from various threats.
It’s important to follow the recommended settings and configurations provided by the security plugin to ensure that your site remains secure and protected.
7. Website Audit
It is recommended that website owners regularly check their websites to ensure that they are updated and functioning properly.
They should review the website’s code, test the responsiveness of the design and find and repair broken links if any.
It’s important to thoroughly walk through the front end of your website to identify any issues that may have been missed during backend maintenance.
While backend maintenance is crucial, visiting the site frequently can help you identify and address any issues that may impact visitor engagement and conversions. Regular website audit can help to make sure that your website remains functional and user-friendly which further helps to provide a positive experience for your visitors.
8. Monitoring Security
WordPress is the most widely used website platform; this is a prime target for cyber attackers. It’s important to take measures to protect your WordPress site from potential security breaches.
Regularly running malware scans can help discover any suspicious activity on your website and prevent hackers from getting sensitive information. Furthermore, enforcing strong password habits, for instance, resetting admin passwords regularly and enabling 2-factor authentication, can help tighten your site’s security and prevent unauthorized access.
Final Thoughts
Maintaining a WordPress website is a routine task but it is often overlooked by website owners. In the rush to achieve success quickly, many webmasters forget the importance of regularly maintaining and optimizing their WordPress site and experience a host of problems including maintenance issues, slow load times and security vulnerabilities that can disrupt your website’s performance
One of the best ways to prioritize regular maintenance is to implement these 8 steps on a monthly basis. You can also go for WordPress Monthly maintenance packages from reliable WordPress maintenance agencies for a fast and secure website.
