15 Crucial WordPress Maintenance Tasks

Is your WordPress site gradually losing SERP ranking? Or are you facing downtime and slowdown issues? If yes, it’s high time you should emphasize the maintenance of your WordPress.

Regularly keeping up is essential to ensure your website is SEO optimized, performing well, and providing a satisfactory user experience. Due to a lack of maintenance, your website can get into major security risks; there are chances of losing your WP site permanently.

Therefore, you must regularly check its performance, speed, and other factors. There are many plugins and automated services that make these maintenance tasks much easier. Thus, you can grow your site successfully.

So, here we bring you 15 crucial WordPress maintenance tasks that you must follow. Therefore, without any further delay, let’s begin-

Why Is Regular WordPress Maintenance Important?

Regular WordPress maintenance is essential to keep your site secure and search engine optimized. While running a WordPress site, you may sometimes delete content unintentionally, or your site may disappear for several reasons.

In this case, adding backup to your regular maintenance task can help recover your contents. Besides, checking up on the security features is also essential to keep your site safe from unwanted access.

Replying to comments of visitors fixing broken links, and 404 errors are also crucial aspects of WP maintenance. This helps to enhance user experience. Thus, you can make your website more engaging and reliable.

WordPress integrates with tons of plugins to run different functions. But, excess plugins can make the site slow. It’s not just the unused plugins, unnecessary themes, and deleted items in the recycle bin that also make your site heavy.

This eventually hampers the performance of your site. So, you must delete them to ensure your site runs smoothly.

Apart from all these, checking the WordPress version and updating plugins and themes are also essential maintenance steps. This keeps your site bug-free. As a part of yearly maintenance, you should renew the domain name and look up if you are satisfied with the hosting services.

Thus, regularly maintaining your WordPress website lets you keep its performance on track. It also enhances your online presence and ranks your site higher on SERP. Therefore, if you want to get the expected result from your site, regular maintenance is a must!

Top 15 Crucial WordPress Maintenance Tasks

To make the WP maintenance task convenient, we have divided it into five groups- daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual maintenance. This will help you to keep proper track of your website and maintain it well to get better performance-

Daily WP Maintenance Tasks

1. Backup Your Website

Backup is an essential step that all WordPress users must follow to ensure all its content remains safe and secured. Anytime your website may face a hacking issue, or you may unintentionally delete some content. In such a situation, having a backup is a relief.

But is daily backup essential? This depends on the engagement and frequency of your post. For example, if you blog post daily or three/four times a week and get comments, you will probably like to back up content daily.

Here, we advise you to back up the database daily, but you can back up other files once a week. However, if the case is you post content on a weekly basis, then regular backup is optional.

The major benefit of website backup is that you can recover quickly if your website crashes. Thus, you can avoid data loss. Besides, when migrating from one platform to another, you can easily transfer the contents using a backup file.

Nevertheless, daily backups may sound hassle-free, but the real picture is different. WordPress has a wide range of backup plugins that will store your content automatically. You can customize the setting or fix a schedule when the plugin will back up the selected content you want to store.

Some popular WP backup plugins include- Jetpack, BackupBuddy, UpdraftPlus, etc. It doesn’t matter which one you choose; here are some facts that you must consider to get the best backup solution for the WP site-

• Always search for an incremental backup plugin to minimize storage space and quickly restore data.
• Look for multiple storage facilities supporting local and external hard drives.
• Consider automatic scheduling options.
• Look for a backup plugin with an encryption facility; it will protect sensitive content efficiently.
• Make sure the plugin you choose is active and frequently updated.

2. Reply To Comments and Delete Spam

Comments on your post are an integral part of making them engaging. So, never underestimate these tiny conversations. Make replying to comments a daily WP maintenance habit. Always try to reply to the inquiries as fast as possible. This proves the activeness of your blog page.

Thus, it builds reliability, and the visitors or customers can easily trust you. You will get a notification on your WordPress dashboard when you get any comments. Go through the comments and reply to create an engaging site.

However, a common issue with the comment section of WordPress sites is that you may find a ton of spam comments. This makes it difficult for visitors to find essential information. Besides, these spam comments make your website appear unprofessional and untrustworthy.

Above all, this directly impacts the SEO ranking. This will eventually reduce the overall quality of content and lead to lower search engine rankings.

To avoid such situations, you must try to delete the spam comments regularly or once a week. However, manually deleting them is time-consuming. In this case, you can use plugins like- WP Bulk Delete. Such plugins identify the spam comments and let you delete them directly from the dashboard.

Once you install and activate the plugin, go to the dashboard and look for the plugin. Select Delete Comments, and it will open up a page with comment status. Click the Spam Comments option and press the delete button.

This app also has a ‘Delete Time’ option where you can schedule or set a time when the spam comments will get deleted automatically. This will make your daily WordPress maintenance task much easier.

3. Review WordPress Security

One of the common mistakes that most users make is not taking care of the malware attacks on a regular basis. Your site can get hacked, leak personal information, and delete your content. This can also permanently disable your site.

So, you need to keep your website secure and free from malware and hacking risks. And for this, you will have several WordPress security plugins to protect your site. Some popular options include- Jetpack, Wordfence Security, All-In-One Security, and more. Here are the benefits that these plugins bring to you-

• Security plugins with automatic features track the malware and take action immediately. Thus, your site remains safe.
• Your security plugin protects your website from unauthorized login attempts using a brute-force attack prevention feature. When someone tries to log in without authorization, it blocks the ID or implements other security measures.
• The strong enforcement password prevents the hacks from logging in using random password guessing. These plugins give you a difficult password and save it to your Google account. So, hacks can’t quickly go into a password-guessing game.
• Security plugins have a 2-factor authentication or 2FA feature. You will be notified for verification when someone tries to log in using a different account. Thus, you can stay alert and take the necessary steps when there is any unwanted attempt to log in.
• There are various reasons why your website may slow down. You may monitor these factors if you have a security plugin. Your website notifies you immediately by email or SMS when there are downtime concerns. By doing this, you can resolve any hosting or server problems.

Above all, you can automate the malware detection and scanning process using WordPress security plugins. This will help you with daily WP maintenance and protect your site from unexpected attracts and downtime issues.

4. Clear the Recycle Bin

Usually, WordPress trash items in the recycle bin get deleted automatically after 30 days. But when there is bulk trash stuff, it may cause issues with WP performance.

The trash, revised posts, pages, and other unnecessary items can bloat your WordPress database. This will eventually slow down your website and hamper user experience. And this will directly impact the ranking on SERP.

Besides, these bloated databases have a lot of space on your web server. This can be a great headache when you are using a hosting plan with limited storage. So, to avoid such issues, regular cleaning of the recycle bin is a must. This will keep your site junk-free and prevent downtime problems.

Additionally, there may be vulnerabilities in old and unused data. Regularly cleaning your database will reduce the potential attack surface and minimize the risk of security breaches. Now, how do you delete data from the trash or recycle bin?

You can either go for manual cleaning or use WordPress plugins for this purpose. You can manually perform SQL queries to eliminate unnecessary data from the bin if you’re comfortable working with databases.

However, plugins are the best solution to automate the process. For instance, Quick Empty Trash is a popular WP plugin that helps you save time while emptying the trash for any post. It adds an ’empty trash’ button to the list table of each post type.

Thus, you can empty the junk folder for that post type without loading the list of trashed posts. Besides, you can also use WPCode; it has an automatic feature. You can set the time for trash cleaning, and it will do the task for you.

Weekly WP Maintenance Tasks

5. Check Updates of Core Plugins & Themes

Updating the software brings improvement in performance. It could be the update of your WordPress version, plugins, or themes. As soon as an update of your software is launched, you must get access to it. Remember, outdated software has security threats and is more prone to getting hacked.

Developers identify the possibilities of these threats and bring updates to their systems. And to keep your site safe, you must go through these updates. Besides, you may also face compatibility issues by using outdated plugins, and most of them may not work as expected.

This is why you will find a warning while installing any outdated plugin that hasn’t been updated with the upgrade of the WP version.

However, you have to use plenty of plugins with WordPress, and keeping track of the updates of individuals can be tricky. But there is nothing to worry about as there is an update; WordPress will notify you with the red mark on the dashboard. You can simply click on it and get all your software updated.

But in some cases, you might miss an update. This may happen when you use a paid plugin or theme, and its license expires, and you can’t look for updates. In this case, manually check for updates by visiting the WordPress Updates page.

Verify that every plugin and theme you have installed is the most recent version by going over each one. If they’re not, be careful to note why you’ve decided not to update.

However, to get notified about the updates, you can also use free plugins like- WP Updates Notifier. Using this, you will receive emails instantly when any of your plugins have a new version or are updated. Thus, your website will always remain upgraded, eventually boosting performance and securing the site.

6. Test All Your WordPress Forms

If your well-off business suddenly falls and you are getting fewer orders, check out if the important forms on your site are working. Many a time, businesses face this issue of not receiving emails that link the website forms.

As customers fill out the forms or try to contact you via contact forms, it doesn’t reach you. This can be due to several reasons. For instance, a misconfiguration on your email service or WordPress hosting can stop sending emails.

That is why you should check the important forms, like contact forms, registration forms, etc., at least once a week to see if they are working properly. Test them as anonymous users to get the real experience of how the visitor finds your site.

Also, test the WordPress form plugin you are using. There might be some issues with the plugin for which it might not respond as expected. However, you should use well-reputed plugins that are active and have frequent updates. Ninja Forms, Forminator, ARForms, WPEverest, etc., are some of the top choices for WordPress form plugins.

7. Monitor Uptime, Downtime And Overall Performance of Your Site

If you are running a business, you know how critical uptime is for your site. One minute of downtime can cause a huge loss to your business. It may result in a decline in revenue for companies and e-commerce websites, particularly if website operations are their main source of income.

Extended downtime gives a bad user experience and ends up harming the website’s reputation. Besides, website uptime is taken into account by search engines like Google when determining their ranking algorithms.

Frequent downtime can lead to a drop in search engine rankings. That is why you should always prioritize your website’s availability. And for this, here are the things to follow-

• Look for managed WordPress hosting with higher uptime; consider 99.99% uptime for the best user experience.
• Consider the geographical location of the hosting provider to ensure maximum availability.
• Don’t overload your site with too many unnecessary plugins, images, and videos that impact the site’s speed.
• Use tools like  DownNotifier and Super Monitoring to monitor your site’s uptime and downtime percentage and take action accordingly.

However, you need more than just checking up on the uptime; you must go through the overall performance of your site. Check the speed of your site and loading time.

If your site takes more time to load, it increases the bounce rate, which impacts the SEO ranking of your site. So, you must keep all these in check. You can use tools like  WebPageTest, GTmetrix, or Pingdom for tracking site speed.

Monthly WP Maintenance Tasks

8. Fix 404 Errors & Broken Links

Search engine crawlers like Google regularly index websites to update the search results. If there are any broken links or 404 errors, it will prevent search engines from indexing your content.

As a result, your content will not appear in search results or get lower visibility. This will hamper the website’s credibility. So, to improve the SEO ranking of your site, fixing 404 errors and broken links is a must.

But before fixing them up, you must know why you may face these issues. There are various reasons why the server may show a 404 error. For instance, you may have mistyped or deleted the URL but kept the page on the sitemap.

Because of this, your website receives several 404 errors when search engine crawlers attempt to index it. To fix this up, here are some tips to follow-

• Verify all your URLs are written correctly, and update them on sitemap.
• If the URL has been relocated to a new page, set up a 301 redirect.
• If you have deleted the page, set 404 and clear it from the sitemap.

Besides, as your website grows, you will face issues with broken links. In your blog post, you will add several external links that may not exist anymore. Many of these links may have disappeared, or others might have been in a new location.

It’s not just about these external links; you may also input broken links by mistake by adding poor link format, spelling mistakes on the link, or posting broken images. This greatly hampers user experience.

But how can you find the broken links among hundreds and thousands of links used on your site? No worries, there are plugins available for broken link identification and fixing. To fix them, you can use Broken Link Checker, Link Whisper Plugin, etc.

9. Perform a Deep Content and SEO Audit

You must deeply research the published content on your website every month. The more often you do this, the better outcome you can get. For this use, Google Search Console or  Google Analytics and SEO tools like AIOSEO and SEMrush as your assistant.

•  Google Search Console

The Search Performance page of Google Search Console is a helpful tool to track the keywords for which your site appears. It contains average position, click-through rate (CTR), impressions, and clicks for particular keywords or search queries.

Using this information, you may determine which keywords are bringing up your website in search results, even when its performance might be lacking. Your click-through rate or average position is relatively low for these keywords.

You can thus enhance the search ranking and click-through rates by identifying keywords through data analysis.

• Google Analytics

Google Analytics gives you information about the origins of website traffic. It analyzes social media, paid advertising, direct traffic, referral traffic, and organic search traffic and lets you know which sector is getting more engagement.

Thus, you can have a plan on where to improve your marketing to bring more customers to your site. You may also monitor the effectiveness of individual pages on your website by knowing what type of content is getting more visitors’ responses.

This helps you locate content that is well-liked or draws a sizable audience. Thus, Google Analytics enables you to improve the user experience of your WordPress website.

• All-in-One SEO

All in One SEO is a well-known SEO plugin for WordPress. You can quickly optimize your articles’ and pages’ title tags and meta descriptions with AIOSEO and increase engagement of your site.

Besides, this plugin creates XML sitemaps automatically, making it easy for search engines to crawl and index your website’s content.

AIOSEO also has a schema markup feature that provides rich snippets, such as star ratings, event dates, and product prices. This enhances the visibility of your content in search results.

• SEMrush

SEMrush is one of the most popular SEO tools for WordPress users. It runs the website audit automatically and identifies issues with your website’s SEO. For instance, you can find broken links, missing meta tags, and duplicate content.

Thus, it helps you to take the necessary steps to improve your WordPress site for better SEO performance. It further offers content optimization recommendations. For example, it will give you suggestions regarding readability, keyword optimization, and on-page SEO elements.

Quarterly WP Maintenance Tasks

10. Optimize Images on Your WordPress Site

The image takes more time to load than the text. And if you have large images, it can make the site slow. For this, you must check your site’s images as a part of WordPress site maintenance. 

Image optimization is especially required when you have a multi-author site. In this case, many of your authors may not be serious about image optimization. This will eventually result in slowing down the speed.

So, always try to avoid large images and resize them to your site requirements instead. You can also compress the images using plugins like – Smush, EWWW Image Optimizer, and ShortPixel Image Optimizer. However, here are some tips you should follow to optimize images of your WordPress site-

• Enable lazy loading for images.
• Add descriptive alt text to your images.
• Use the right format for your image.
• Resize and compress the images.

11. Improve Internal Linking Structure

When you create a blog post, you interlink it with your previous content that is relevant. As time goes on, new sources are added to your website. You will find many new blog posts or articles related to your previous content.

In this case, you should add the links of these new posts to the old ones. This will upgrade the old articles and make them more useful to the readers. So, make some time to revise your old content and improve the interlinking structure for better results.

12. Deactivate and Delete Unused Themes and Plugins

WordPress has a whole bunch of free plugins; that is why you sometimes don’t give a second thought while installing them. Eventually, it ends up in junk, which you rarely use. Having a lot of unused plugins and themes on your site makes it heavy and thus impacts the speed.

Besides, many risk issues can badly affect your website’s security and performance. That is why you should identify the unused plugins and deactivate them. To detective and delete themes of plugins, follow the below steps:

• Log in to your WordPress dashboard.
• Go to the Themes or Plugins section in the left-hand menu and select the item you want to deactivate and delete.
• In the details page, you’ll find options to deactivate or delete it.
• Click the ‘Deactivate’ button to deactivate it, or choose the ‘Delete’ button if you want to remove it permanently.

Annual WP Maintenance Tasks

13. Change All Your WordPress Passwords

Your first line of protection against illegal access to your website is a strong password policy. For all of your online accounts, you should always use strong, one-of-a-kind passwords.

Nevertheless, even with secure passwords, your site can get hacked. For this, we advise you to change the password at least once a year. You should change the pass of all online accounts, including FTP or SSH accounts, WordPress database, and WordPress admin panel.

You must use a strong password so hackers can go for any guessing game. Here are some tips for setting a strong password:

• Keep your password long.
• Avoid using predictable things like name, birth date, phone number, etc.
• Mix It Up with numbers, alphabet, symbols, etc.
• Add Two-Factor Authentication.

However, one common problem that you may face with string passwords is that they are hard to remember. To solve this issue, use password manager apps like 1Password. These apps store your pass securely and fill up automatically without requiring you to type them.

14. Don’t Underlook UX Design of Your Website

You can never be confident enough with your UX design. As time goes by, you will get to know more about your customers’ demands and make changes accordingly. Throughout the year, try to understand what the visitors look for on your website.

For instance, if your site didn’t have a search bar when designed, add it now to help visitors find their desired content by typing the keyword. Besides, if you don’t have a FAQ section on your website, add it to help visitors find their targeted information quickly. This can boost user experience by many times.

Always think of features that will make your site more engaging. Check the fonts of the site are clear enough; you should also consider the color you use. It is okay to make your site playful using colors, but too much color can be overwhelming.

Besides, ensure the icons and other elements have correct placement on the website. You should also consider the responsiveness of your site. Mobile responsive website design is a must to provide a better user experience.

However, whatever changes you make, don’t bring up too different designs that confuse your visitors. Ensure the regular visitors can identify your website even after you have changed in UX design.

15. Renew Domain, Hosting, and SSL

You must include the annual renewal of the domain name, hosting services, and SSL in the list of WordPress maintenance tasks. Domain renewal is an integral part of the security of your website.

It ensures that your site is active and is available to visitors. If you don’t renew it, your domain may become inactive and deny your access.

However, you will receive a notification from the domain register about renewing your domain name and SSL certification. So, there is nothing to worry about if you don’t remember.

Besides, many domain services have auto-renewal features for SSL certification. This makes your WordPress maintenance much more convenient.

Regarding your WP hosting, point out if you are really satisfied with their service. Hosting plays a crucial role in the performance of your site. So, choose one with higher uptime, faster speed, and better security facility.

If you are not satisfied with your current hosting, look for alternative managed WordPress hosting services.

Best WP Maintenance Services: Automate The Tasks

If you find maintenance of your WordPress site a hassle, get assistance from WP maintenance services. Many WordPress site maintenance providers take care of all the core tasks to keep your site on track.

For instance, these services update your plugins, themes, and WordPress versions. Besides, you will not need to worry about backup, security, and SEO. Here are some trustworthy WP maintenance services for your site: 

1. WP Buffs

WP Buffs is a fantastic choice if you want a group of professionals to take care of most or all of your maintenance duties. You will get weekly updates for your plugins, theme, core files, website backups, and more. Besides,  it offers uptime monitoring, Cloud backups, and emergency support.

Pricing: $79/mo for WP Maintenance; higher plans are available with better features.

2. GoDaddy

GoDaddy offers a subscription-based service called WordPress Premium support that covers fixing up all WP site issues and its maintenance.  This service can handle everything from updating WordPress to optimizing it.

If you already have a GoDaddy hosting service, getting a maintenance service from the same platform will be best for you. This service will handle WordPress development, theme & database management, and all administrative updates. Thus, you will get an all-in-one solution with GoDaddy.

Pricing: $49.99/mo to $149.99/mo.

3. ManageWP

ManageWP provides all the necessary tools to automate your WordPress website’s maintenance activities. You get access to free monthly backups, performance tests, and upgrades for your plugins, themes, and core files.

These features are all free to use. You can add paid upgrades to access further capabilities, such as keyword tracking and routine site audits for broken links.

Pricing: Free; Premium plan- 1$-2$ per month.

4. Siterack

You can automate all of your upgrades and maintenance tasks using Siterack. It provides daily virus scans, backups, one-click restorations, and uptime monitoring. Besides, all the plugins, themes, and core files are automatically updated by Siterack.

The most unique feature of this service is its AI error detector, which distinguishes it from other WordPress maintenance services. This tool analyzes your site daily to discover any serious issues on your or your client’s websites, thus keeping your site secure.

Pricing: $5/mo to $119/mo.

5. FixRunner

Looking for an affordable WordPress maintenance service? FixRunner is an excellent option to go for. It backs up your website regularly and keeps all data safe. This tool also conducts security checks, speed optimization, and round-the-clock service monitoring.

The most amazing feature of FixRunner is that you can pay for one-time services. And if continuous support is required, you can sign up for long time plans.

Pricing: $59/mo to $149/mo.

The Bottom Line

Maintenance is essential if you want to keep your WordPress site secure and optimized. We have pointed out 15 crucial WordPress maintenance tasks in the above discussion for optimal site performance.

You should follow all those to keep your website free from bugs and rank higher on search engines. However, to sum up, always use the latest version of WordPress and update the plugins and themes.

Keep the URL structure perfect and avoid broken links to help search engines index your page. You should always give time to SEO facts to keep the visibility and engagement to the peak.

Last but not least, keep updating your content and check up on the hosting services on a yearly basis.

Frequently Asked Questions