The Ultimate Guide to WordPress Maintenance

One of the best things about having a website is that it’s always available to your customers, audience, or community. An online store can sell your products 24/7. Your blog can entertain your audience whenever they decide to visit it. A landing page can catch prospects around the clock. WordPress Help

A good website is like a machine with plenty of moving parts that never stop working. Once in a while, you should give those parts a closer look, check for wear, and clean up any grime that’s gathered. That’s pretty much what you’re doing during a regular WordPress maintenance.

Why Is Regular Maintenance Important for Your WordPress Website?

The very fact that you’re here implies that you have some level of appreciation for the work that’s necessary for maintaining a website in a good state. At the very least, you understand that maintenance work is something that needs to be done. But then again, it’s also easy to think that a website is something that’s just there once you put it online — if the host keeps it up, it will be online and working indefinitely.

But even if that were the case, the world in which your website exists might change enough to make your site very much out-of-date. We’re not talking about the design, even though it too needs to be updated once in a while. Links will become broken. Plugins will go out of date. People will find ways to compromise the security of your website.

The fundamental reasons why regular maintenance is essential for your WordPress website can be summed up with one acronym – B.U.S. It stands for:

Backup, as a way of ensuring you don’t lose any content or data from your website.

Update, which applies to the WordPress core, plugins, but also content and links.

Secure, to make sure that your website, its visitors, and their data, are safe and sound.

A lot of the things you’ll be doing during WordPress maintenance will, in one way or another, contribute to one of these three. That doesn’t mean that you can’t do some work that might only be good for improving your website’s performance. You can, but you must remember what it’s all about and always take care of these fundamentals.

Preparing a Maintenance Schedule

When you first start putting down on paper everything you need to check and tweak and look into during maintenance, you can easily be overwhelmed by the number of things that found their way on your checklist. Some of them can even take a large toll on your spare time, too. And that’s without mentioning that some tasks might be well above your skill level.

Website maintenance can be all of that, but it can also be a part of your routine. The best way to tackle your website’s maintenance requirements would be to divide them by how frequently you need to perform them. Some activities require that you do them daily. But there are also those you should perform weekly, monthly, or even once per year. Finding out what it is that you need to do, and how often you should do it is the first step towards creating a proper maintenance schedule.

The second step involves finding ways to make the maintenance less demanding both in terms of time and skill. And if the first step was all about dividing the tasks so you can conquer them more quickly, this is about arming yourself with the right tools for the job. That means finding the right plugins to help you perform the maintenance tasks.

Finally, you should know that some of the more significant maintenance work might require you to make your website temporarily unavailable to visitors. The way you stop them from visiting your website is by putting it in maintenance mode. WordPress has this feature built-in, and it’s activated automatically for every core update. However, if you’re doing any other type of work besides updating your version of WordPress, you’ll need to bring it up with a plugin. With all of this in mind, let’s see the different maintenance tasks you might perform at regular frequencies and what tools you can use for them.

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