Ever pondered which WordPress maintenance tasks you ought to be performing regularly? Subsequent to beginning a blog, regular users don’t perform maintenance checks except if something breaks. By running regular maintenance tasks, you can ensure that your WordPress site is continually performing at its best. In this article, we will share 5 important WordPress maintenance tasks to perform frequently, and how to do every last one of them.
When and Why to Perform WordPress Maintenance Tasks?
Your WordPress site is a powerful system made of a few sections. This incorporates your WordPress hosting, WordPress software itself, themes, and plugins.
Over that, you include your own particular content with image and texts. Together, every one of them makes a website that is adored by your visitors and customers.
In any case, this system requires to be looked after to ensure optimal performance. There are a few simple maintenance tasks that you can perform all the time to ensure that your website is working at its best.
How frequently would it be advisable for you to perform WordPress maintenance tasks?
On the off chance that you run a busy website with a lot of traffic, at that point at three months. For smaller sites with low traffic and content, you have to do these maintenance tasks every six months.
Now that being stated, let’s take a look at the essential WordPress maintenance tasks you have to perform and how to do them.
#1. Change All Your WordPress Passwords:
Passwords are your first guard against unapproved access to your website. You should always use strong different passwords for all your online accounts adding your WordPress website, database, and FTP accounts.
However, even if you are utilizing solid passwords and they are compromised, at that point it is possible that you wouldn’t even notice it.
That is the reason WordPress security experts recommend to change your WordPress passwords regularly. This includes passwords for your WordPress admin area, SSH or FTP accounts, and your WordPress database password.
#2. Generate a Complete Backup of Your Website:
Backups are the most crucial WordPress tool in your arsenal. There are a lot of great WordPress backup plugins that can help you totally automate the WordPress backup process.
However, sometimes your backup solution may all of a sudden stop working without you even noticing.
On occasion, you have to manually run your backup plugin to generate an entire backup of your website. In the wake of running the backup, you have to check that your backup files are properly stored at the remote location of your choice (Google Drive, Dropbox, etc).
#3. Check and Update All WordPress Files:
WordPress comes with a built-in system to manage updates for WordPress core, themes, and plugins. You should always utilize the latest version of WordPress and keep all your themes and plugins updated.
In any case, there are a few situations when you may miss an update. For example, when a premium theme or plugin license expired, and it failed to check for an update.
Go to the WordPress Updates page to physically check for updates. Review all your installed themes and plugins to ensure that they are running the latest version.
#4. Check and Delete Spam Comments:
If you are utilizing Akismet to combat comment spam in WordPress, at the point it automatically keeps spam away from your comment moderation queue.
Be that as it may, now and then Akismet may end up marking a legitimate comment as spam. Once in for a moment, you have to take a quick look at the spam comments to ensure that there are no real comments inaccurately marked as spam.
When you are done, you can securely delete all spam comments from your website. In the event that you have the huge number of spam comments, at the point, you should use this method to batch delete all spam comments in WordPress.
It wouldn’t really improve performance, however, it will ensure that you don’t miss out genuine comments.
#5. Test All Your WordPress Forms:
WordPress form builder plugins like WPForms make it super simple to generate excellent forms on your website.
Anyway because of misconfiguration on your WordPress hosting server or your email service provider, in some cases these forms may all of a sudden stop sending emails.
You have to check all forms on your website to make ensure that they are working properly.