Recently I have been doing an increasing amount of WordPress website maintenance work for clients. Website maintenance is essential, particularly if you are using a content management system such as WordPress for your website.

Why is WordPress website maintenance essential?

If you don’t keep you WordPress software and plugins up-to-date then you have an increased chance of your site being hacked, running more slowly and dropping its search engine ranking.

WordPress and its plugin authors regularly provide software updates. These updates need to be applied so your site will continue to function properly. If you don’t install these updates, you run the risk of code conflicts and elements of your site becoming out-of-date with current browsers. Your site will also be more vulnerable to hackers and won’t function as efficiently as it could do.

How to regularly maintain your WordPress website

1. Backup your site

   You should always take a full backup of your WordPress site before running any software updates. A full backup means a backup of the database and all files. Your web host should already takes regular backups of your site. Your host may also charge a fee to restore a backup for you in which case you may want to avoid this by taking your own backup before you know you will be making changes to your site.

2. Install updates

   WordPress regularly provides free software updates to the WordPress core software along with any themes and plugins you have installed.

   When you’re installing WordPress core updates, make sure you upgrade the WordPress core first, followed by your theme(s) and then any plugins. It’s important to run the updates in this order to avoid any plugin and theme conflicts which can take down your entire website.

3. Process site comments

   If your site allows users to leave comments then it is very common for you to receive ‘comment spam’. Comment spam is low-quality comments posted for no other reason than to build a link to another website (a backlink). These comments are generic and unrelated to your site content.

   The best way to deal with comment spam is to stop it before it strikes as when it takes hold you can end up having to deal with hundreds of spam comments a day. Anti-spam measures can be set up to help prevent a flood of spam comments.

4. Keep your site secure

   There are many security measures you can put in place to try to make your WordPress website more secure. However, at the very least you should ensure that the username for your site is not ‘Admin’ and that you have a secure password including at least one number and an unusual character.
   Use Google Webmaster Tools as this will alert you if it looks like your site may have been hacked.