Can you remember the first time you installed WordPress for your site? There were minimal plugins and the website had insane load speeds. As your site grows, it is easy to accumulate clutter. This could affect the performance of your WordPress website. You don’t want bloated plugins and heavy themes to be the reason why you’re not ranking in the SERPs. In order for your WordPress site to work properly, it needs to be maintained the right way. For an experienced WordPress user, some of the tips we’re going to highlight will be familiar.
Keep Up With the Updates
It might not be a fancy tip but is one of the most important ones. You need to ensure that you have the latest version of WordPress installed. In addition, the plugins should also be up to date. This is something that doesn’t need investing in a WordPress maintenance service for it to be done.
According to a 2016 study that was done by Sucuri, more than 56% of the websites that were hacked were running on an older version of WordPress. As much as WordPress is secure for the most part, there are occasions where there are vulnerabilities that are quickly patched with a new update. Failure to update makes your website susceptible to hacks. WordPress has a new feature that makes automatic updates possible. You don’t have to worry about doing the process manually.
Run Regular Backups
You not only need to make sure to run regular backups but check often to see if they work. You’ve probably heard about the myths going around that you don’t need backup. Your web hosting company might not be responsible in case you lose important files. A good hack will be to have two separate backups in different environments. You can also run the backups at separate times.
Cleaning and Optimizing the Database
Your database will be clean and tidy when WordPress is installed for the first time. Once you start adding different functionalities to the site, the database starts to accumulate junk. You can think of it as dust in your house. If you don’t make any efforts to clean, it will only be a matter of time before you start experiencing all kinds of problems. Spam comments, post revisions, table overhead, and transients lead to junk. There are plugins that can help clean up your database even if you’re not a techie.
Broken Internal and External Links
Broken links will not only impact the user experience but can affect your SEO endeavors. Checking for broken links manually is time-consuming, especially if there are hundreds of pages. There are tools that can automate the process of finding and fixing broken links. As there have been reports that such a plugin can slow down a site, it should only be used when you’d want to check for broken links.
Monitoring 404 Errors and Settling Up Redirects
When a visitor lands on a page on your website that doesn’t exist, they’ll see the 404 error. Even though you can control broken links on your site, you don’t have a say if the dead link is on another website. That’s why it is important that you’re constantly monitoring the 404s so that you’re linking to the right resources. Google Search Console makes it easy to monitor 404s but there are plugins that can make the work seamless.
Check Page Load Speeds
User experience is one of the ranking factors that is increasingly becoming important according to Google. If you notice that your website has started slowing down, there could be a couple of reasons worth exploring. It could be a plugin that is the issue or the template that you’re using. You can run your website and individual pages through Google Page Insights. There will be suggestions on improvements that can be made to the page load speeds.
Hire Someone to Do Maintenance
As a business person, you might be occupied with other commitments that you barely have time to do to anything else. That is why it will make sense to hire a more experienced person to handle the maintenance of your WordPress website. There is peace of mind that everything will be taken care of by experts.
To Sum it Up
WordPress maintenance isn’t enjoyable by any stretch but is something that needs to be done on a regular basis. By taking a proactive approach, there are fewer hacking attacks and a better chance of high rankings when it comes to SEO.
