Your website is your best employee.
It’s working 24/7 to promote your brand online.
Protect your investment and keep it running like a well-oiled marketing machine by properly maintaining it with these important steps.
By following these critical WordPress site maintenance tasks you’re protecting your investment and ensuring you’re providing the best possible experience for your visitors.
Wondering if WordPress is right for you? Check out this article on why it’s my go-to CRM solution.
WordPress Site Maintenance Tasks: Software Updates
Keep your software up to date!
This is the biggest problem concerning the security and stability of your website.
Software that isn’t consistently updated becomes increasingly vulnerable to hacking and malware.
It’s also becomes less compatible with popular browsers which leads to poor user experience and even a broken site.
The longer you go without updating the more likely you are to get hacked.
It’s really as simple as that.
If the software on your site isn’t up to date, you risk hacking, your site not functioning properly, or completely breaking.
Keep all the software you’re using secure and compatible by consistently updating it when new versions become available.
WordPress Site Maintenance Tasks: Backups
Are you running backups on your website?
Do you have multiple versions of backups going back in time?
If not, you’re taking as serious and unnecessary risk!
Backup your site regularly and keep multiple copies to create a history.
Also, make sure your backups are complete and contain all the files and databases. A partial backup is better than nothing, but a full backup always wins the day.
That way, you can go back in time as needed in case the worst should happen.
This is particularly true if you publish new content regularly, but applies to every website.
Remember that it’s a lot easier and cheaper to restore from a backup than to rebuild a site!
Save yourself a lot of money, time, and anxiety by regularly backing up your website.
WordPress Site Maintenance Tasks: Optimizing
Optimizing your website keeps it stable, running fast, and reduces the resources it needs from your host.
- Keep your images optimized
- Compress your files and code
- Minify your files and code
- Keep your databases clean
- Discard old revisions
By keeping your website optimized, you’re helping it to run smoothly and quickly.
And, by reducing the load on your host’s servers, it can save you money!
WordPress Site Maintenance Tasks: Monitoring
What’s the status of your website right now?
Is it up and running as it should be?
Or, is it slowing down, or even offline?
Monitoring your site is critical to knowing its overall health and ensuring you’re getting all the value of your investment.
Stay in the know with uptime and performance monitoring.
Take things a step further and add your website analytics so you know the basics of who’s visiting your website.
WordPress Site Maintenance Tasks: Consistency
Consistency is the key to properly maintaining your WordPress website.
Set up a maintenance schedule and stick to it.
The longer you neglect the maintenance of your site, the more susceptible it becomes.
You’ve invested in your website already and it’s working 24/7 to promote your brand online.
Keep it working like a marketing machine by following the WordPress site maintenance tasks listed above.
WordPress Site Maintenance Tasks: Resources
Now that it’s clear you need to be maintaining your site and whats required for proper maintenance here are some resources to get you started.
You can leave it up to the pros and hire a company to take care of all your WordPress maintenance for you.
There are also companies that only do WordPress maintenance like the ones featured in this article.
Or, you can go for it yourself. This requires at least a basic knowledge of WordPress development and isn’t the best solution if you’re not familiar with the software. However, if you are familiar, you can use services like managewp.com to help streamline the process.
Lastly, you can let your host take care of all your WordPress maintenance tasks for you (provided they offer a solution that meets your needs).
This is an easy solution but I’ve found it doesn’t always work out because sometimes updates break a site and they might charge extra to “fix” that problem.
However, maintenance plans from freelancers or agencies often come with time included in the plan that at least mitigates that problem.
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