After all the hard work you and your developers put into creating a website or blog on WordPress (it’s a pleasure actually), you finally sit down for some well-deserved time off – Not so fast! It’s the entropic principle: Your work is never done. Your responsibility as an admin of your website doesn’t end once the theme / plugins are in place and you have begun to post on something akin to a schedule. There’s a whole lot of maintenance to do to keep your website running in top condition: without errors and complications.
WordPress Maintenance
But don’t sweat it. Everything you’ve heard about WordPress’ user-friendliness is true. Maintaining your website is one of the many ways you’ll come to realize that. So, armed with nothing but good intentions and the thought of preventing a whole load of trouble later, here’s the beginner’s guide to running upkeep on your very own self-hosted WordPress (which means WordPress.org and not WordPress.com) website.
You have to complete every step in the given order, starting with:
1. Taking a Regular Back Up
Before you make any changes on your website, build a safety net by creating a backup.
Why – If anything goes wrong, you can restore your website from a backup fairly quickly and easily. We reiterate, it’s your first and strongest safety net in various situations like hacking, accidental lock-out, major code-breakage, etc.
How – There are multiple ways – manually, from hosting company or by using a plugin of your choice. There are amazing backup plugins (which have now become a full-fledged service) with additional features like cloud storage, easy restore, etc. UpdraftPlus, VaultPress, BackupBuddy, etc. are great choices.
- Some hosting providers offer routine backup services, but it’s better not to rely completely on them. For example, SiteGround offers daily backup for 30 days on all shared hosting plans. However, this will change over time and you need to check with your host for the same.
- Remember to backup your entire site, including the database. Or get a separate plugin for database backup (like WP-DB-Manager).
- You can also manually download files through FTP and DB through phpMyAdmin or Adminer tools.
2. Keep Track of Updates and Upgrades
This is one of the most tedious, boring and complicated steps in your maintenance process, especially if you have a large website with loads of plugins.
Why – Updates are necessary for security (older versions’ security flaws are known to public), better performance, and new features.
How – There’s no plugin which will handle it for you. Tread carefully:
- WordPress Core: Both minor and major version upgrades take place automatically unless you or your hosting company switched it off. In that case, you need to manually upgrade by navigating to “Dashboard > Updates” section in your admin panel.
- Themes: Make sure you have a backup in place. It’s also good to have your frontend code changes (minor theme adjustments made via code) saved in a child theme or plugin instead of actual theme files, otherwise they’ll get overwritten and you’ll lose them all.
- Plugins: Update plugins last! And do it one-by-one.
WordPress allows you to enable auto-update for themes and plugins. However, it’s better to disable auto-update and do it manually after testing throughly. Don’t panic if something broke during the update. Refer to Troubleshooting section of WordPress Updates page in Codex.
3. Managing Comments
When you have a larger site, you will understand more than 90% of received comments, trackbacks and pingbacks are spam. That’s an astounding amount of spam and managing them on your WordPress blog is equally a challenging task.
Why – Comment spam, trackbacks, pingbacks, etc. get its own special mention in maintenance because they are bad when left to accumulate over long period of time. Unapproved comments (spam or otherwise) will hog space in your database and make it slow, and trackbacks / pingbacks are spambots / idiots trying to push their irrelevant, spammy links into your comments section. This is why moderation is necessary.
How – Plugins to the rescue! There are some powerful anti-spam plugins in the repository, available for free (and some for a fee). WP SpamShield AntiSpam and Akismet are two of the best. Use them to moderate spam and keep it manageable. You should also disable trackbacks and pingbacks by going to “Settings > Discussion” and un-checking the “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) on new articles” box.
4. Beefing-up Security
Why – This one is a no-brainer; we all know it’s a terrible world.
How – It’s not paranoia if it’s true. You can never do enough to harden WordPress security. Always staying updated is good. Secure servers are better. Plugins like WordFence, Sucuri, etc. are necessary for regular scans and security checkups. But you can always do more. Here’s a nice-sized list of WordPress security tips for your developers to take a look at (you can also work with it if you can handle that).
5. Database Optimization
Or oiling the gears… take your pick for this WordPress maintenance task.
Why – Over time, post iterations, unapproved comments, orphaned metadata (which is the information about your data), etc. will simply sit around taking up space in your database. This is bad for query times (how fast your website responds) and can make a dent in your performance scores.
How – Again… plugins! Simply use a plugin like Perfmatters, WP Optimize or Speed Optimizer for SiteGround to shake out the cobwebs from your database and keep it squeaky clean. Good thing that you can schedule this stuff to reduce your overall maintenance burden!!!
6. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Why – You have a site to offer some services, products or content for users. So, all your hard work will become waste if users are visiting your site. Though you can use paid pay-per-click advertising, getting free (organic) traffic from Google, Bing and other search engines can help to increase your revenue (especially ad revenue).
How – Yoast SEO, Rank Math and many other SEO plugins can help to do the basic stuffs like optimizing your XML Sitemap (which you need to submit to Google and other search engines), doing content analysis, etc. Make sure to add Google Search Console and Analytics tracking code in your site (same SEO plugins can help) to monitor the traffic and audience details. There are also other routines:
- Check the broken links (both internal and external) and fix them.
- Test the site on pingdom or GTmetrix to keep track of your page loading speed.
- Add alternative text (Alt text) to all images.
- Randomly test your site’s functionalities like home page, contact forms, call-to-action buttons, etc. Make sure to regularly purge the cache of your CDN, plugins and hosting server so that users will see the updated design / content.
Endnote
That’s all there to effective WordPress maintenance. More than these steps, it’s your willingness to learn more about the platform that will make WordPress website maintenance an easier job. And if you run into any snags, take a deep breath and remember that it’s not the end of the world. Check with your hosting company, theme / plugins developer and ask for help on WordPress support forums. It’s one huge, happy-to-help community, but you may need to wait some time as it is free.
