WordPress checklist

WordPress Maintenance Checklist

Table of Contents

Check analytics of your website

Regularly check the analytics of your website. You can identify sudden traffic drop, Google algorithm changes, if you closely monitor the analytics of your website.

Moderate Comments

Visitors can communicate with other users via comments. Since anyone can comment on your post you have to moderate them frequently and make sure you are not going to show spam comments in your site.

You can see all the comments added by the users inside the comment section of the admin area and you can delete unwanted comments and approve the legit comments. 

Content Audit

Content audit is another important task you can do to evaluate the progress of your website with respect to SEO point of view and user experiences.

First you can identify the content which brings more traffic and you can enhance that content to the next level. Also, you can edit or remove the content which does not bring you any traffic.

 

Backup of your WordPress site

Take the backup your site and database regular interval to recover your site in case of a failure. You can get manual backup or use plugin to get automatic backup. Make sure your backup can be restored without any issue.

Update WordPress Core, theme and plugins

Update WP to the newest version as soon as possible and also update the theme if theme has got new version. You can do the same for the plugins. This updating process will help to protect your site from hackers and virus.
 
In addition to that, you can enjoy new features of the WordPress with new releases.

Improve Performance of WordPress

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Find broken links and images

404 error is displayed to the user when requested page is not found and broken links also lead to 404 error page.

 

To find out broken links you can use Google Search Console or any other SEO analysis tool and once you identify then you can fix them by showing proper 404 error messages to users.

Monitor SEO Ranking

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Optimize the database

Database optimization is needed to speed up a WordPress website. Over time, due to growth of the database, MySQL database may become slow when you execute queries.

You can use a database optimization plugin to optimize your database.

Change admin password

It is good practice to change the password at least once a year.  Do not forget to use a strong password when you change it.
Apply the limiting logging attempt feature to protect from brute force attacks.
 

Improve the Security of WordPress

Maintaining the security of your WordPress is very important to run your business. You can implement the security at the server level and application level.

You can use good WP Security plugin like MalCare or Sucuri Security.

WP Managed Hosting Service

Over the time your website grows so your traffic to the website will increase and you will need high bandwidth for data transfer. If you have more than 20,000 visitors per month then a shared server does not work for you. You have to look for a good managed WP hosting provider.

Optimize Images

Image optimization is very important to improve the loading speed of your WordPress site. There are several technique you can apply for image optimization.
 
You can use good image optimization plugin like smush can be used for this.

Remove Unwanted Images

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Create and modify 404 page

404 error is displayed to user when requested page is not found and broken links also lead to 404 error page.

To find out broken links you can use Google Search Console or any other SEO analysis tool and once you identify then you can fix them by showing proper 404 error messages to users.

Verify your backup

Backup of your WordPress site should be able to restore quickly without giving any errors when your website goes out of service or malware is injected. So, you have to make sure the validity of your backup when taking the backup.
You can use a staging server or local development environment to test your backup.