How to Maintain a WordPress Website

There are millions of articles on the web that tell you how you can maintain your WordPress website. So, why another article on the same subject?

Well, we believe there’s a gap that every other WordPress maintenance article is trying to fill. And that gap is the results that one can achieve after successfully ensuring that their website is up to date.

So, today I’m not just going to tell you how you can update your WordPress site. I’m also going to explain what are the benefits of updating the site.

However, keep in mind that uploading new content or ensuring an intuitive interface is not an integral part of your overall web maintenance.

I mean, they are important for digital success. However, WordPress site maintenance is something more about the functionality, features, and modernization of a website.

This maintenance can include plugin updates, feature additional, bug fixes, and WordPress software updates. The most critical of all is the WordPress software update because while updating, several developers have face errors and issues.

So, to minimize the risk of you ending up losing all your traffic or hard work that you’ve created – we have put together some of the most important tips that will help you while you’re maintaining your website.

Let’s get started!

WordPress Maintenance Tools & Strategies

If you’re going to opt for maintaining your WordPress website, you need a specific set of tools and strategies.

These tools and strategies will enable you to efficiently fix your WordPress site while monitoring and making a backup.

Secondly, the strategy part is for ensuring the time-saving approach towards web maintenance. There are times when people end up spending hours and hours on maintaining their website, which is absurd.

So, here’s a set of strategies and tools that’ll help you maximize your website’s performance swiftly:

Backing Up Your WordPress Site

Why should you back up your site before making any edits or fixes?

Well, you should save the state your website is in before making any edits because in in-case anything goes wrong – you’ve always got the option to restore the old version of the site that was working.

There are a number of ways through which you can make backups of your site. For example, you can use WordPress plugins to create backup automatically.

You can also opt for the manual approach and create a backup via the cPanel of your hosting provider.

Moreover, if you ever get stuck, just watch a YouTube video of how you can create a backup with a few single clicks, and you’ll be done in no time.

Clean Your WordPress Database

From the first heading, you may have already guessed that I prefer WordPress plugins that do most of the job for you. They end up saving you some valuable time.

In the second heading, I’m going to suggest that you use a WordPress database cleaning tool that handles everything seamlessly.

There are several tools out there that can remove stale post revisions and trash for you automatically.

Lastly, while cleaning the database, also look for the plugins that are no longer in your use and delete them.

Check For Search Engine Indexability

You want to give your website maximum exposure so that people can find it on the internet. In fact, once your website gets ranked on the first page of Google, you’ll see a lot of traffic coming your way.

However, to see if your website is indexed or not, you need to follow this method:

Open Google.com
Type ‘site: YourSite’sName.com
Hit enter.
If your page comes up in the result, this means that your website is indexed.

However, a more advanced way of checking for indexability is by leveraging a popular tool, Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool.

This SEO tool analyzes your entire website, identifies broken links, uncover duplicate content and carry out other critical SEO related task to help ensure that your website is a search engine and user friendly.

Implement a Security Check

A security check is necessary because it identifies malware, bugs, and issue within your website.

These viruses can even lead to your site not functioning properly or not working at all.

Hence, you need to scan your WordPress blog or an entire site for errors.

Security checking will also help you identify if your site has been infected or if there are loose ends that hackers can use to bring down your website.

It may come to your mind that you’re not a worthy target for hackers but know that malware has a life of its own, and it certainly doesn’t care who you are.

Luckily, there are various WordPress security plugins that can help you run a security check on your website.

Initiate Maintenance Mode

When maintaining your WordPress site, I recommend you turn on the WordPress maintenance mode.

This would enable the staging effect so that the changes that you’re making are not visible to your audience.

The maintenance mode shows your audience a message that your site is currently unavailable due to maintenance.

Although this step is important and suggested by developers while you’re updating your theme, I think that it’s important enough for you to know about it.

Now, how can you enable it? Well, there’s this free plugin called WP maintenance mode that you can use for this purpose.

Analyze Your SEO

There is no denying the importance of SEO for your entire digital business. You need to get your website indexed to attain a position in the SERPs.

Once the position has been given, you can optimize your site to appear higher on specific keywords, and trust me, this optimization is a never-ending battle.

So, how can you analyze your site’s SEO?

There are free SEO plugins for that too!

You can download and integrate Yoast SEO that gives you a perfect overview of your current SEO performance.

It also lets you know the content that you need to optimize to improve search engine visibility.

The most famous aspect of this plugin is the red light that you have to turn to a green light to ensure SEO optimization.

And turning the light green only takes a few minutes; however, the results are impeccable as you’ll get more traffic and search engine rankings. If you need help with your SEO configurations you can find affordable SEO packages at MWD.

With all the essentials out of the way, let’s see how you can make your WordPress maintenance as efficient and less painful as possible.

Easiest Approach Towards WordPress Maintenance

With the list of tools and knowledge that you need to monitor your site’s maintenance out of the way, here’s some additional advice on how you can make the process of maintaining your site easy and swift.

Opt For Regular Maintenance

Use tools like Google calendar or the built-in reminder app of your PC to remind you that you need to conduct another maintenance process of your website.

Maintaining your website every now and then will ensure minimal errors from time to time as compared to maintenance is once a year.

Test Your CTAs, Forms & More

Your site would surely have CTAs and forms that are there to take the users from a simple form to the email platform of your choice to create a relationship. So, test and check them for their performance and if they’re performing the intended task or not.

Do this because you don’t want your leads or potential customers to skim your website without taking any actions, right?

Set Goals & Monitor Your Keywords

There’s an old saying – “what gets measured get managed.”

Therefore, you need to measure your site’s performance. Analyzing this would enable you to make drastic improvements to the points where your site is lacking.

The best and free way to monitor your site’s performance is by leveraging Google Analytics. This tool will help you determine your keywords, the traffic that you’re getting, bounce rate, and literally everything else important.

Over To You

So, once you’re done selecting the tools and planning a strategic roadmap to follow – you would be able to conduct WordPress website maintenance like a professional.

I recommend setting intervals and routines to foster effective WordPress site management and maintenance.

The overall maintenance is super-important because it has the power to help you revolutionize your sales and conversions.

Think of your website as a digital storefront of your brand; no one would come if the store is messy, full of clutter, and whatnot!

Therefore, follow the guidelines mentioned in this blog and ensure a swift, intuitive and stunning experience for your customer.