10 Best Tips to Make WordPress Maintenance Smooth
Do you remember the ‘inside and out’ of your WordPress website? Or what was the last time when you checked your site was up-to-date?
If it was recent, it’s totally ok but if it was a few days or months ago, you might be losing something in your business.
Just like you maintain and manage every primary thing of yours, the same applies to your business website. Creating a website is one thing but regularly maintaining it is the most crucial one. To make a good business from your site, you must regularly improve and maintain it with the latest versions. Now the question arises ‘Is a WordPress website easy to maintain’?
Yes absolutely! You just have to follow some basic tips and suggestions and you are good to go to have a smooth maintenance experience.
To sort it out for you here is a list of the 10 best tips to make WordPress maintenance smooth. Let’s read further to know!
Best Tips to Have Smooth WordPress Maintenance
Take Regular Backups
You know WordPress has a very fantastic feature of creating a backup of your website without much effort. Taking regular backups of your site can save you from any unexpected problems like hacking or any update failure.
Whenever you publish new content on your website, make sure to perform a backup on a daily or weekly basis. There are basically two categories on behalf of which you can perform a backup.
- If you are owning an e-commerce website, you need to back it up daily as new customer data is added daily.
- If you have an informational website, you can take a backup on a weekly or monthly basis as per the regularity of the posts.
You must be thinking of it as a tough task, but there is so many plugins option available to automate this task. With regular backups, you can be tension free as in case of a site crash or something, your data is safe.
Monitor the Functionality
Your website should have good functionality if you want to give a good user experience. And it’s very important to check regularly if everything is working properly. But confused about what to monitor regularly on your website?
To keep your audience engaged and happy, there are some basic things that you can monitor:
- You should thoroughly check device and browser compatibility.
- Test the forms on regular basis.
- Check every link carefully to know if the navigation is ok or not.
If you do these basic things with care, you can easily enhance the user experience and get more traffic to your platform.
Update Themes and Plugins
WordPress provides you with regular updates and new versions. If you do it on a routine basis, you can save your website from security issues. WordPress is one of the favorite targets of hackers being the most popular. To overcome this, developers are making new versions every day with the latest security updates.
WordPress hosting service providers can handle this for you if you opt for this. Otherwise, you can install WordPress updates by yourself. Also, you can enable auto-updates for security releases.
You should update the latest versions of themes and plugins. By doing this, you can keep your site smooth to navigate. Also, you have the option of a Rollback plugin to get the older version back if the latest one doesn’t work for you.
Tight the Website’s Security
One of the best tips to save your web platform from hackers is to tighten the security. Performing a regular security scan can save your dream project to get ruined. You can follow some of the given points to tighten up your site’s security:
- You can use a security plugin that can protect your site from hackers and malware attacks.
- Strong passwords are the key to being safe and secure. Also, you should avoid using the same password for all of your WP websites.
- You have the option to enable two-factor authentication. So, use it to create a protective shield for your site.
Perform a regular security scan and check if anything wrong is going on with your site. Take appropriate action on time to save it.
Keep an Eye on Broken Links
Broken links are one of the most irritating things for users. If they find irrelevant and broken links while navigating your site, they can leave the platform. This may result in a poor user experience and you may lose the traffic coming to your platform.
Hence, you should make regularly practice checking for broken and empty links. In the place of plugins, you can use external tools to check this for you. This will not make your website slow as some plugins can do.
There is also an option to integrate Google Search Console with your WordPress website to get error notifications. Once the scan is completed, you can repair broken links to redirect to the right pages. This will surely enhance search engine optimization for your platform.
Remove Unnecessary Plugins
It’s a very common practice to remove files and plugins that are no longer in use. It takes up space and can cause so many troubles for you. So, you should be careful to choose the best you need.
If you think there can be a need for any of the plugins in the future, you can download it again as the process is very simple. Removing unnecessary plugins is a simple practice but it can give you a lot in terms of the site’s speed and security.
If your WordPress development services provider doesn’t do this from time to time, this may become your headache. As it becomes so difficult to trace every single file code and plugin. So, unneeded file codes and plugins have to be removed on time by the respective developers.
Check Pending and Spam Comments
Monitor pending and spam comments are two things that come under Comment Moderation. If you check pending comments regularly and give replies, this will work best for your visitors. If you answer them well, they will surely return to your platform.
And another important aspect is to check spam comments. You should regularly remove spam replies in your comment section. If you don’t do this, this may leave a bad impression on the visitors.
Also, if you don’t have time to do it, you can disable this section. It’s better not to give any information than to give a false impression. This will also make your site spam free.
Database Optimization
The website’s database is clean and organized when you first install it, But after it starts working, it takes up a lot of junk. It may not affect the working of the website, but still, it looks dirty to have an unoptimized database.
Having a sluggish database can impact the speed of your website. Because the WP database stores all kinds of posts, tags, comments, pages, custom fields, etc. These all things can make it unorganized.
So, try to do regular database optimization. You can use various database plugins for this by just installing and configuring them. Also, you should take a backup of your database as well.
Properly Test the Forms
Testing the forms well on your website is one of the important tips to have smooth WordPress maintenance. This can have a real impact on your online business.
There is a vast variety of WP form builder plugins available through which you can build beautiful forms. But there can be any misconfiguration on the WP hosting server that may affect the working of the forms. This is very common after updating your website. That’s why it is necessary to properly test the forms on a routine basis.
Forms are an important thing to bring customer retention to your website and enhance sales. If a form is not working, this may bring a lot to suffer in your business.
Last but not least,
Debugging
Debugging is one of the necessary tips to follow in every case whether it’s development, designing, or WordPress maintenance services. It may take a lot of your time, but it is significant to do it. Without proper testing, you can’t make your users happy.
You should check if your developers are performing it well or not. Most of the developers do it manually which can cause a lot of headaches in the process. There are so many plugins available to make this easy for you. Through this, you can easily find and edit the bugs and give a smooth working experience to the customers.
Final Words
So, this is all about the best tips to make WordPress maintenance smooth and fantastic. If you follow these steps well, you can be the master of your online platform. These tasks seem to be dull to you, but trust me, they are the base to make a well-optimized WP site.
By following these baby steps, you can gain heavy traffic to your platform that too in very less time. It’s very advisable for you to make maintenance tasks a priority.
You can make this process easy and simple through a proper schedule. This will remind you of important points to take care of!
If you have any other questions in mind, you can ask us. We will serve you happily!
