6 Essential WordPress Website Maintenance Tasks

Setting up a WordPress site can be quick and easy. However, managing it requires much more time and effort. Neglecting your website will likely lead to security risks, errors, and performance issues.

Therefore, it’s important to regularly perform maintenance tasks to keep your site running smoothly. For example, frequent backups and software updates ensure that your site remains secure. You’ll also want to fix broken links and remove spam comments to ensure user-friendliness.

In this post, we’ll dive straight into six essential WordPress maintenance tasks. Then, we’ll discuss the best option for handling ongoing maintenance. Let’s get started!

#1. Make Full WordPress Backups

One of the most important WordPress maintenance tasks is making full website backups. Essentially, a backup is a complete copy of your site at a particular point in time.

Besides content like posts, pages, and products, backups also store database tables, key website files, theme settings, and more. And if you run an ecommerce store, you’ll need to make copies of customer and order data too.

This way, you’ll always have an up-to-date version of your WordPress website on hand. This is especially important if your WordPress site gets hacked. But it’s also useful if you accidentally make a mistake or encounter WordPress errors.

If you have some technical knowledge, you can back up your site manually using phpMyAdmin or FTP. But the easiest backup solution is to install a plugin. That said, there are some limitations to using backup plugins.

For instance, some will store backups on the same server as your live site. Instead, it’s best to keep your website copies on a separate server, ideally a remote storage location. This ensures that your backups remain secure even if the server gets hacked or damaged.

#2. Update WordPress Core, Themes, and Plugins

All WordPress sites consist of three components: the Core software, themes, and plugins. These undergo continuous development to ensure top performance, maximum security, and compatibility.

It’s important to update WordPress software when new versions are available. Luckily, you’ll receive notifications in the WordPress dashboard when updates are released.

You can also check by going to Dashboard > Updates:

Here, you can see whether you’re running the latest version of WordPress. Plus, you can carry out any theme and plugin updates listed on the page.

Most site owners are aware that updates come with new features and functionality. But newer versions also tend to provide refined code, security patches, and bug fixes which help keep your site secure.

#3. Optimize WordPress Performance

As your website grows, you’ll likely add more plugins, install new themes, and populate your site with more content. All of this can slow down your WordPress site, which can hurt your search rankings and damage the user experience (UX).

Therefore, another key part of WordPress maintenance is to carry out optimization tasks. To start with, it’s useful to conduct a quick page speed test using tools like Pingdom or WebPageTest:

After that, you should receive a performance score, as well as some tailored recommendations to speed up your WordPress site. This might mean installing a caching plugin, using a content delivery network (CDN), or compressing WordPress images.

But you can also find more technical suggestions. For example, you might be encouraged to eliminate render-blocking JavaScript or optimize the WordPress database. Alternatively, it could be beneficial to prioritize the loading of critical CSS above the fold.

#4. Find and Fix Broken Links

Although this can be a tedious job, one of the most important parts of website maintenance is fixing broken links. Typically, these links return error pages or blank pages which can disrupt the UX and make your website appear unreliable.

There are various reasons why dead links exist on your WordPress site. If you’ve used external links in old posts, there’s always a chance that the content no longer exists or has moved to a new location. But you may have also mistyped your internal links when adding them.

The best way to find and fix these links is to trawl through your pages and click on the links to see where they lead. If you’re pushed for time, you can use a plugin like Broken Link Checker to handle this task for you. Plus, many SEO tools and tracking platforms (like Google Analytics) let you do this.

#5. Remove Spam Comments

The WordPress comments section enables readers to ask questions and leave feedback about your posts. However, it’s also a prime target for hackers who might direct visitors to spammy websites or add harmful links that contain malware.

Even non-harmful spam can be distracting to visitors and make your WordPress website seem untrustworthy. Therefore, it’s good practice to review all comments and remove any that you find suspicious.

If you have comments enabled, simply visit the Comments tab within the WordPress dashboard. Here, you can view all comments left on your site and even delete multiple comments in bulk.

You can also go one step further and configure some comment settings to moderate the section more stringently:

By going to Settings > Discussion, you have the option to enable comment approval or require users to register or log in before leaving comments on posts.

#6. Review User Accounts

Most WordPress sites contain various user accounts including subscribers, authors, editors, and more. The problem is that every account functions as a gateway for hackers to gain unauthorized access to your site.

For this reason, it makes sense to review all user accounts and make sure that they’re assigned to the correct role. Each role has its own set of permissions. A Subscriber can only read posts and edit their profiles whereas an Administrator has full control over the website.

It’s best to operate on the principle of least privilege, so that users don’t have more permissions than they need. This can also contain the damage caused by WordPress hacks since site access will be greatly limited.

It’s also a good idea to remove inactive users since many hackers create fake user accounts to target your WordPress website. You can concentrate first on users who don’t log in consistently. Or, it may be the case that users have set up an account, but they’ve never left a comment or bought a product.

How to Handle WordPress Website Maintenance

Now that you know more about WordPress maintenance, it’s time to start thinking about how to handle it. You could hire a specialist WordPress website maintenance service, but this can be very expensive.

Of course, you have the option to perform WordPress maintenance tasks yourself, but this can be time-consuming. Plus, you’ll have to think about how to minimize disruption to your site visitors. For instance, you might need to enable maintenance mode.

Therefore, the easiest way to handle WordPress website maintenance is to use a managed hosting provider like NameHero:

Besides storing all your important website files, managed WordPress hosting gives you access to a dedicated team of experts who can handle all essential maintenance tasks. These plans often come with built-in tools to increase WordPress security and boost your site’s performance.

At NameHero, all of our WordPress plans provide daily backups and automated WordPress updates to keep your site safe and secure. This means you don’t need to handle these tasks yourself, or rely on third-party plugins.

Performance optimization also isn’t an issue thanks to NameHero’s powerful high-performance servers and LiteSpeed caching technology. On top of this, we implement several security measures including DDoS protection, a web application firewall, and a free SSL certificate.

NameHero’s managed hosting packages cover all essential WordPress maintenance services to simplify website management. Better yet, support is available 24/7 to help you resolve problems promptly and troubleshoot issues.

Conclusion

Every WordPress website requires regular maintenance to run smoothly. Otherwise, you’re more likely to encounter security threats and performance issues. These problems can have a negative effect on your conversions and search engine rankings.

To recap, here are six essential WordPress maintenance tasks to perform regularly:

1. Make full WordPress backups.
2. Update WordPress Core, themes, and plugins.
3. Optimize WordPress performance.
4. Find and fix broken links.
5. Remove spam comments.
6. Review user accounts.

The easiest way to handle WordPress maintenance is to use a reliable managed hosting provider like NameHero. This way, you’ll get access to several maintenance services including daily backups, automatic updates, security monitoring, and more. Check out our plans today!