15 Checklist For WordPress Website Maintenance: The Ultimate Guide

Are you also confused about what to include in your WordPress website maintenance list?

Like any website, it’s crucial to regularly update and maintain your WordPress website to keep it running smoothly. Ignoring maintenance can cause problems such as security risks, slower website speed, and even crashes.

In this blog post, we’ll give you an easy WordPress maintenance checklist for 2024. We’ll share the best practices and tips to help you keep your website running smoothly. Our guide will include steps like backing up your site, performing security scans, optimizing your database, and ensuring your content stays up-to-date.

So, let’s first explore what WordPress website maintenance is!

What Is WordPress Website Maintenance?

WordPress website maintenance refers to the ongoing tasks and processes to keep a WordPress website secure, updated, and optimized. It includes various activities to keep the website functional, secure from threats, and aligned with the latest best practices.

Why Is WordPress Website Maintenance Important?

Running a WordPress website is similar to owning a bike. Just like your bike needs regular maintenance, your WordPress website needs consistent maintenance to keep it in peak condition. In this digital age; maintaining a WordPress website isn’t just about aesthetics, it drives your business by connecting you with your customers.

Let us see why WordPress Website Maintenance is important:

• Security: Failing to update your WordPress website can leave your site vulnerable to hacks, malware, and other security threats.
• Performance and SEO: Database optimization and caching help improve site speed and performance. A faster website equals happier customers. A well-maintained site with fresh content, optimized meta tags, and fast loading times rank better in search engines, attracting more traffic.
• Compatibility: Another benefit of maintaining your WordPress development services is it helps ensure compatibility between WordPress core, themes, and plugins. Outdated components can cause conflicts, errors, or even site downtime.
• Backup: Regular backups will prevent data loss due to hacking, server issues, or human error. Having recent backups ensures you can restore your site quickly if needed.

So, if you don’t like facing increased loading time, security issues, and a drop in search engine rankings, the answer to how to maintain a WordPress website should be at the top of your agenda.

As we have understood what and why WordPress maintenance is important, let us jump directly to our checklist. To make it easy for you, we have made a complete checklist for your WordPress website maintenance.

How Often Do We Need To Maintain Our Website?

Like every lock has a different key, the frequency of WordPress website maintenance tasks depends on various factors such as your site’s complexity, traffic, and the rate at which you add new content. Here’s a WordPress website maintenance checklist based on frequency:

1. Ongoing Tasks:

These WordPress maintenance must be carried out on a daily basis and with some right plugins and tools these can be fully automated.

1. Monitor Website Uptime

It’s crucial to keep your website accessible to your customers. An unresponsive site can harm user experience and lower your SEO ranking. Monitoring your website’s server uptime helps you catch outages early and address them before customers notice.

2. Monitor and Respond to Security Alerts

Review security logs regularly and upgrade any necessary software. Daily security checks assist in detecting and addressing potential threats before they escalate into significant issues.

3. Backup

Having a regular backup system is crucial to safeguard your website’s data from loss caused by technical problems or security breaches. Always create a backup before making any changes to your website to ensure you can recover if something goes wrong.

2. Weekly Tasks:

Another checklist includes updating plugins and themes require careful attention because these updates could cause your website to malfunction. So, it might be beneficial to take help from a professional to handle your website maintenance. Therefore, hire top-tier WordPress developers to craft the perfect solution.

Let us look into the weekly updates to be taken care of:

1. Update Plugins

One should update the WordPress theme for bug fixes, security improvements, etc. It is vital for security, performance improvements, and compatibility with new technologies.

2. Check for Broken Links

Other than older links in your website there could be an issue of broken internal links. You might accidentally have broken images, poorly formatted links, or misspelled links, which could frustrate visitors and reduce their interest in your site.

3. Review Security Logs

It is essential to review security logs to monitor the website for security threats and apply security measures. This type of log can help you track down successful hacking attempts even if you’re the only one who uses your site.

4. Review Website Analytics

It involves analyzing website traffic and user behavior to inform decision-making.

5. Test Contact Forms

With WordPress form builders like WPForms, making professional-looking forms for your website is simple. However, these forms might stop sending emails if your WordPress hosting server or email provider settings are incorrect. Regularly check that all forms on your website are working correctly.

3. Monthly Tasks:

In order to maintain your website, it is of utmost importance to backup and update the website and database, to check for any security issues and fix them. This would also help increase the website speed.

Given below are the important updates to be done on a monthly basis:

1. Update WordPress Core

These updates usually include improvements in security, bug fixes, and sometimes new features to improve performance and usability.

2. Test for Browser and Device Compatibility

To ensure that your website is compatible with multiple devices and browsers, you should check its compatibility with each one separately.

3. Fix 404 and PHP errors

Your users shouldn’t be left hanging by 404 errors. Make sure you track and redirect these errors. PHP errors are often minor, but they can also provide valuable information to hackers and slow down your site.

4. Review SEO

Utilize your SEO using tools like Google Analytics. Regular checks help you see how well your website is doing and make any needed improvements.

5. Clean Up and Optimize Database

The WordPress CMS is a database-driven platform and this could accumulate a lot of unnecessary information over time. Optimizing the database could thus get rid of unwanted data as well as improve its performance.

Read Also: Guide to White-Label WordPress Support

4. Quarterly Tasks:

You need to update the content as well as your SEO strategies every three months to keep your website revised. Care has to be taken to check and update your user experience and website design to maintain your website.

Find below the important updates to be done quarterly:

1. Review and Update Content.

This includes removing unnecessary WordPress users and cleaning up the Media library. Keeping your content up to date ensures that your website stays relevant and valuable for your visitors.

2. Check Website Security

Keep an activity log of significant changes on your site.

3. Update the Theme and change WordPress credentials.

Your WordPress website, your FTP accounts and your database should have a strong and unique password. Despite this there could be chances of it getting compromised, therefore we recommend changing it quarterly.

5. User Experience (UX) Review

Review content, and responsiveness to make improvements based on the feedback gathered. This will ensure that your website is easy to use and enjoyable for visitors, helping to improve their experience and satisfaction.

Read Also: Top 10 Benefits Of White-Label WordPress Maintenance For Agencies

5. Annual Tasks:

These tasks could be done once a year to maintain compliance with industry requirements and maintain your website’s security.

Let us check out the crucial yearly tasks:

1. Renew Domain and Hosting

Keep a check on the status of your hosting plan and domain registration to avoid unexpected downtimes or expirations.

2. Update SSL Certificate

It is necessary to monitor and update the SSL certificate before it expires in order to maintain security, functionality and compliance with industry standards.

3. Evaluate Website’s performance against its initial Goals.

Yearly maintenance should include an in depth review of your content. With Google Analytics, you can see who is visiting your website and what they are doing.

By analyzing this data, you can find content on your website where your traffic is high but your conversion rate is low. Google Search Console allows you to see; for which search terms your website appears on the results page. By updating these articles, you can easily rank higher for these keywords.

4. Review Backup Strategy

This minimizes the risk of data loss, reviews potential vulnerabilities as well as keeps us abreast of the latest tech updates in order to improve compliance.

5. Update Privacy Policies, Terms of Service and Legal Pages.

Keep these documents up to date as it is required for legal protection and compliance.

Read Also: Top 5 Pricing Models For White-Label WordPress Maintenance Services

Having gone through the necessary updates to be undertaken to maintain a safe and robust website, here’s a table that will help you summarize the same.

To conclude, it’s important to keep up with regular maintenance for your WordPress website. This means making sure everything is secure, works well, and gives visitors a good experience.
By keeping plugins, themes, and the main software up-to-date, checking how well your site is running, and fixing any problems quickly, you can make sure your website is reliable and lasts a long time, meeting the needs of your visitors and others who use your site.

Build Or Maintain A Safe And Personalized WordPress Website With Zealous System.

Whether it be a smooth transition from HTML to WordPress or developing a visually appealing and fully functional website, Zealous System’s team of WordPress Developer can help you build a customized solution that meets your needs.

Zealous System offers complete white-label WordPress website maintenance services designed to keep your clients’ websites running smoothly, securely, and efficiently. Partner with us to deliver top-notch maintenance solutions under your brand, and enhance your service offerings without the hassle of managing it all yourself.

We understand the importance of having a reliable website, and we can proudly claim to provide our clients with the utmost form of committed quality and satisfaction. So, if you want to build or maintain a WordPress website, get in touch with us and let us help you take your digital identity to new heights!

Read Also: Guide to Offshore WordPress Development