WordPress is a content management platform and website builder that is behind some of the biggest sites on the planet. It lets you easily create a site or blog, and allows for a ton of creativity and customization when it comes to what you create.
However, while building and deploying your website is important, you also need to maintain it. Whether you want to use a WordPress monthly maintenance package or do things yourself, these are some important maintenance tasks that you should aim to do regularly to keep your site looking and performing well.
Perform Necessary Updates
One of the first and most important maintenance tasks that you need to do is to perform updates within your site. Everything from WordPress itself, to the various different themes and plugins you use will all get updated from time to time and new versions will come out.
These updates will address security gaps, add new features and functions, improve performance, and fix a number of other issues in general. If you ignore these updates, your site simply won’t perform as well as it could, and there could be security vulnerabilities as well. You will often be informed when updates are available, but be sure to check the updates page every now and then to ensure you haven’t missed anything.
Change Your Passwords
Another thing to consider doing every now and again is changing your passwords. Passwords are what protect your website from unauthorized access and hacks, which can ruin your site or business as a whole. You need to ensure your passwords are strong and difficult to guess, to be as safe as possible. They should contain multiple letters, symbols, and numbers, and not be related to you or your site in any way.
And while many security breaches are caused by weak passwords, even if you use strong passwords, it is still a good idea to change them frequently. You never know who might have figured out your password without your knowledge, so changing to something new every few months is always a good idea.
Changing your passwords and making sure that your passwords are strong can protect your site and ensure that only those that you want to access it will be able to.
Run Performance Tests
Another thing to do regularly to keep your site in great shape and optimized is to run performance tests. While people will run these tests early on in the website-building process, and then never again. However, it is a good idea to run them frequently.
Things like new plugins, themes, and other changes to your site have the potential to impact its performance. And with the importance of website loading speed being so massive, you can’t afford to have a site that loads or performs poorly, either. You also want to make sure to test your site on different devices and browsers to ensure that it works well and looks good.
Not only is a good site performance great for your visitors, but it can also be beneficial for SEO purposes, too.
We hope this article has helped you learn a little more about some of the most important WordPress maintenance tasks to do regularly.