Having a website is all but a requirement for many people in the modern day. Some people need it for their business, to show off their work, to share their passions with the world, to show off a portfolio or resume, and so much more.
While there are many places where you can create a website, none are as popular as WordPress. Across the internet, hundreds of millions of websites use WordPress and it is by far the most popular site builder and content management system.
However, to ensure your WordPress site continues to look and perform well, you need to ensure you are doing WordPress maintenance from time to time. Without any further ado, this guide is going to take you through five crucial WordPress maintenance tasks that you need to be sure to perform regularly.
Test Your Performance
Among the most important things to do is to test the performance of your website. You want to ensure your site loads quickly, looks good and is quick and easy to navigate. If users experience lag or certain things don’t function as they should, you could end up losing visitors to other websites.
Testing should always be done, especially after you make any major changes or updates to the site. Anything that may change how it looks or functions could impact performance, and things should always be tested.
Also, with many people using the internet from their mobile devices, you need to ensure that the site looks great on phones and tablets, too. This testing can take some time but is well worth it to make sure that you end up with a site that performs well.
Change Your Passwords
Next, another thing you need to do often is to change your passwords. If you simply leave all of your passwords exactly the same, you could be putting your business at risk. Changing passwords often makes it harder for unauthorized individuals to gain access to your accounts, and is simply a good practice.
When it comes to creating strong passwords, you want to ensure they are long, feature numbers, letters, and symbols, and are hard to guess. The password shouldn’t be related to you, your business, your life, or your website in any way. The more random and difficult it is to guess what a password is, the better.
Perform Updates
Another important maintenance task is to perform regular updates. This not only goes for WordPress itself but also any themes or plugins that you may use. Performing updates is incredibly important as they often add new features, fix bugs, and deal with potential security issues.
For example, if a vulnerability was discovered within a certain plugin, if you don’t update it, your website could be at risk. Make sure to check for updates frequently, and read over the types of things that they address.
A good practice that many people adopt is that they will automatically have their WordPress files updated to their latest version. This saves you time and energy and makes sure that you never miss a crucial update to a theme or plugin that you use on your site.
Create a Backup
Having a backup is without a doubt a very important thing for anyone who has a website. If a problem, crash, or other issue occurs, these backups can ensure that your site can be restored without having to put in hours and hours of work to do it manually.
This is also a good safety net if you accidentally delete things, your site is hacked, or another issue out of your control takes place. Many tools or plugins can allow you to automatically back up your site every so often, but these can suddenly stop working, which can leave you vulnerable. Make sure to always periodically check when your last backup was, and create one if it has been a while.
Check for and Replace Broken Links
A common problem that many websites suffer from is the existence of broken links. These are links on your site that were once functional, but no longer go anywhere. Broken links can hurt your user experience, and be incredibly frustrating for people to deal with.
Every now and then, be sure to traverse through your blog posts and other pages to make sure there are no broken or dead links. If you find some, either remove the link altogether or find a different webpage to link to instead.
This can be especially harmful if the broken links on your site are internal. Google and other search engines often use internal links to better understand a website, so if yours aren’t functional, it could hurt your rankings on search engines.
In conclusion, these WordPress maintenance tasks are incredibly important, and you should look to perform them regularly. They will ensure your site looks good, performs well, and is as secure as possible.
