WordPress Maintenance: A checklist for the end of the year

We know a lot of effort, time and money goes into building a website. But that’s not it. You’re not off to the races. You need to be proactive when it comes to the maintenance of your WordPress website. A lot of areas in a WordPress website needs strict monitoring, which is why you need to make sure to check that each and every area is well-maintained.

Unfortunately, if the important areas go cranky, you might lose your whole website.

But here comes the billion dollar question, “Why is WordPress maintenance essential?”

To find the answer, keep reading.

WordPress maintenance and why its essential

Managing a WordPress website is just like a full-time 9-5 job. After building a website, you cannot just relax because a lot of things can go wrong easily. It’s totally your job to look after your website if you really want your website to flourish.

To keep your online business going, you need to update your site and create backups. If you leave your website unattended for long, it might get into the hands of hackers and malware practitioners which we suppose you would never wish for.

Now you know how important it is to maintain a WordPress website, but how to go about it.

In the next section of this post, we’ll be discussing WordPress maintenance checklist. So keep reading to find out more about it.

WordPress maintenance checklist

If you have made it this far, kudos to you because you’re about to discover how to maintain your WordPress website on a monthly basis.

So without any further ado, let’s get started.

Visiting your WordPress site

It’s highly essential to visit your website once a month like a visitor –You need to observe your site with a visitor’s eyes because that’s the only way to spot errors. Ideally, you should visit from different devices because that will make it much easier for you to spot problems in the content, design layout, etc.

Creating a child WordPress theme

If you wish to make drastic improvements to your WordPress style, you should create your site with a child theme. According to WPbeginner, “a WordPress child theme is a WordPress theme that inherits its functionality from another WordPress theme, the parent theme.” Child themes are used so you can modify or upgrade the main site without losing the custom modifications you already made.

There are certain WordPress users who are always in a pickle because they are too afraid to update their parent theme. Such websites are highly vulnerable and can be easily attacked by hackers and malware, so keeping them up to date is more than essential.

Updating WordPress plugins and themes

Updating a WordPress theme is very easy and should be done regularly to improve your site’s efficiency and protection.

Additionally, remove any and all unnecessary plugins and themes from your WordPress website. However, just removing plugins and themes is insufficient; it’s essential to also optimize the database of your website. For this purpose, you can use any optimization plugin such as the WP Optimize plugin.

Also, optimizing your WordPress database is an important part of your WordPress maintenance checklist.

Optimizing website speed

Since we’re discussing optimization, have you ever thought about page loading speed? A slow-loading page is frustrating for visitors and you might end up losing readers if your website is always slow.

There are plenty of tools available out there that you can use to find out how well your website is performing such as Pingdom Tools, GTmetrix, and Google Page Speed Insights.

These are also some outstanding tools that offer you valuable suggestions that you can use to find out what is affecting your page loading speed and how you can fix it. Unfortunately, these tools are more effective for tech-savvy users.

If you’re not a webmaster, don’t worry, you can still do a couple of things yourself to improve the speed of your WordPress website such as choosing a good quality hosting provider, decreasing size of images, and using CDNs (Content Delivery Networks).

Creating a backup of your site regularly

If you’ll leave your website unattended and at the mercy of the hosting server, you might end up losing the entire content and you probably have to build it from scratch.

Fortunately, there are a number of backup solutions available out there such as VaultPress, BlogVault, and BackupBuddy, to name a few.

Choosing quality hosting

If you were duped into a shared hosting deal by heavily discounted coupons and the promise of limitless everything, don’t worry –you can always migrate your site to a different server. However, keep in mind that managed WordPress hosting is not for everyone. We like WPEngine for its efficient and affordable managed WordPress hosting. They handle the majority of the technical aspects, such as backups and stability, so that users can focus on other necessary things.

If you’re looking for a low-cost host for a personal blog, or if you’re just getting started, we suggest Cloudways and SiteGround. Both offer reliable and high power packages that are absolutely wonderful.

Using strong and unique passwords

The two most popular and common passwords often used by WordPress users are ‘admin’ and ‘12345’. If you’re using one of them, go change it right away. Malicious hackers are always in search of websites that have weak login credentials because they are easy to mess with.

They can even change your login credentials and can literally destroy your website. WordPress even comes with a password indicator that tells you how strong your password is, which significantly means you can even create a NASA-level password if you want.

Conclusion

WordPress maintenance is an essential part of the work. You cannot avoid the burden of keeping things in order if you administer a WordPress website. Though there are several WordPress management solutions available, you must take care of things to ensure you are not overlooking critical areas.