A comprehensive checklist for maintaining WordPress websites

A healthy, long-lasting website requires regular website maintenance. It enables you to detect problems early on, resolve them, and ensure that your website remains operational and beneficial. Follow our checklist to successfully maintain your WordPress website.

Checklist for maintaining WordPress websites

1- Regularly backup your WordPress site.

It would be ideal if you suggested that you backup your WordPress site on a monthly basis. You can even backup your blogs daily if you want, while weekly backups are best for corporate sites. You can backup your site through your hosting provider or by downloading a local copy via FTP.

2- Optimize your Database

WordPress stores the major part of your data in the WordPress database. A database is where you can find all of your site's content. It includes your blog posts, images, pages, videos, settings, and much more. If you want to improve the performance of your website, you must optimize your database. It allows you to clear out the clutter, defragment tables, and improve database performance.

Image Size Opti mization: You can even optimize images for better performance.

Images take longer to load, slowing down your page speed. During the performance checkup of your site, look for images that can be reduced in size or images that are simply too large.

3- WordPress Security

Maintain Your WordPress Passwords: The security of your website is also dependent on how you manage your user accounts. The majority of website owners leave their site's password vulnerable. Passwords are your primary line of defense against unauthorized access to your website. It is best if you use strong, unique passwords for all of your online accounts. These include your WordPress website, FTP accounts, and database. WordPress security experts advise changing your WordPress passwords on a regular basis.

Analyze Your Website For Issues And Malware: Installing a nulled plugin or theme can land you in hot water. You should avoid installing plugins you are unsure about. Nulled plugins or themes may have been hacked or contain modified code designed to cause harm or gather information.

Install a reliable security plugin if you want to protect your website from hackers and other security threats. You can use Sucuri to monitor your website. It will scan your site for malware or viruses that may have been introduced by your installed themes, plugins, or core WordPress. And if it finds malware, it will remove it from your site immediately.

4- Keep an eye on your site's speed and performance.

If you want to attract more visitors, you should provide them with fast-loading pages. Google PageSpeed Insights provides a tool to rank your site's load time and then provides tips to improve it.

Faster websites are not only better for user experience, but they also improve your SEO rankings. When reviewing your site's performance, don't just focus on developing your homepage. Also, test your most successful content as well as all of your important pages.

5- Conduct a Comprehensive Content and SEO Audit

This primary WordPress maintenance task is critical for ensuring that your website is listed in search engines.

Free WordPress plugins such as Yoast SEO can make your life easier. The plugin scans your content and tells you which of your posts and pages need to be optimized for better search engine visibility.

• Do the SEO check:?
• Review Google Search Console reports
• Clean and error-free Permalinks
• On-Page Optimization (headers, keywords, image alt tags etc)
• Titles & Descriptions?
• Internal and external linking

6- Repair Broken Links And 404 Errors

When a user requests a page that does not exist on your website, WordPress will display a 404 error page.

As part of your WordPress maintenance routine, you must constantly check your website for broken links.

Check And Delete Spam Comments

Deleting spam comments is one of the most understated yet effective WordPress maintenance tasks. If you allow comments on your website, you will almost certainly have to deal with spammers. To avoid making a bad first impression, you must find a way to stop comment spam in its tracks.

How to Avoid Spam Comments on Your WordPress Site

• Limit the number of links allowed per post.
• Make a list of words that have been "blacklisted."
• Restrict commenting rights to registered users only.
• Make a comment moderation system.
• Make use of an anti-spam plugin.

It will help if you keep an eye on the spam comments to ensure that no legitimate comments are mistakenly marked as spam.

Please feel free to ask me any questions you have in the comments section below, or you can send me a direct message if you have specific questions or concerns about your own website. I'll do my best to help you recover your hacked site and secure it against future attacks.