WordPress Website Maintenance Checklist

Written by SolvIT Solutions - Blog, Website - No Comments

Just like computer maintenance, webmasters forget that they need to perform WordPress website maintenance in order to keep their blog or website running smoothly.

Precautions Before Using this WordPress Website Maintenance Checklist

You are the webmaster so you will need to take responsibility for your website files. Before installing, deleting, optimizing, updating anything on your blog make sure you do the right thing!

  1. Backup your database: You can install a plugin to do this or do it manually. See the links below for more information.
  2. Backup your posts and pages: You can do this by entering your WordPress Dashboard, clicking on Tools in the left menu, then choosing export. This will take all your pages and posts, but does not always get your special settings or all of your images. This is why we also need to backup files as well. I have used this option to move a website into WordPress but just had to bring the images over manually.
  3. Backup your server files: You can access your WordPress website files through FTP. You will see all of your files in the installation directory where you first installed WordPress. For example if you install WordPress into the root of your domain then the files will be there. If you installed WordPress into a directory on your domain then they will be in that folder, looking something like this www.yourdomain/blog. Browsing your server is a lot like browsing through a computer.
  4. Backup your theme files: If I am upgrading my theme or moving my website I like to copy any customizations that I have made. For example I might have changed the CSS file or maybe I added some code to the header.PHP file. Either way I like to backup these files if I am changing something with my theme. If I am doing a full backup of my website or backing up all the files on the server, then it is not necessary for me to perform this step also.
  5. Use A script or software to backup the entire Website: In this case I like to use WPTwin as it will clone your entire installation including images, users, comments, in fact an exact replica of what you have on your website.

Cool Resources for Backing up your WordPress Installation

http://codex.wordpress.org/Backing_Up_Your_WordPress_Files Backup your files

http://codex.wordpress.org/Backing_Up_Your_Database Backup your Database

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup/ WP database backup plugin

#1. Website Maintenance Checklist – Visit Your Website

This is my number one rule on my website maintenance chekclist! Visit your own website as a visitor, not just in the dashboard! If you have your blinkers on and just go into your WordPress dashboard you will be missing out and the whole website functioning. This is just so simple but webmasters forget about the outside functioning website.

I visit my website every day. Sometimes I find errors myself, and sometimes people e-mail me and tell me. For example one time I went to my blog and clicked on a link on the homepage. It came up with a 404 error. If I did not visit the blog I would not know that there was an error. It turned out to be a plug-in I had installed, messed with the permalink structure, therefore making every link on my blog broken. Luckily I had seen this error before and picked it up straight away.

#2. Update Your Blog

WordPress makes it easy to update or blog. You will see a link to your updates in your WordPress dashboard and when there are updates, there will be a number next to the link.

WordPress Website Maintenance Checklist image WordPress updates 300x256

When you see a number next to the updates link in the menu, all you have to do is click on the update link. This will take you to the WordPress updates page and you will be able to see all of the updates that your blog needs. This could be a plug-in or a WordPress theme, or even WordPress itself. Again, before doing any of this, I like to backup my website just in case.

WordPress Website Maintenance Checklist image WordPress updates2 300x244

#3. Check Loading Times

The loading times of your WordPress website are very important. It is like working on a slow computer. You simply get less work done, and when it comes to website visitors, they visit less pages on a slow blog. You want your website visitors to feel good about visiting many pages on your website so you need to make it load up quickly. Speeding up your website loading time has proven to not only bring in more income, but give your users a fantastic experience on your website.

#4. Check for Broken Links

Years ago one of my websites suddenly dropped out of the search engines and I had no idea why. I discovered it was because I had too many broken links on my website. At the time, I had never heard of this. Anyway I have repaired the links and my website went back to the previous rankings in the search engines. This was when I decided to add checking broken links to my maintenance schedule for my website.

Now in WordPress I use a plugin called broken link checker and it is free. I do not leave it enabled full time because I beleieve it slows down the blog. I simply activate it when I am performing the tasks on my website maintenance checklist.

#5. Delete Unwanted Plug-ins

Everyone has plug-ins that they have installed into their WordPress website and either have deactivated them or have activated ones but are not really using them. these plug-ins are just taking up space and should be deleted. Of course, before doing so, you should backup your files just to be on the safe side. I also suggest that you deactivate the plug-in before actually deleting any files.

See this screenshot below. As you can see there is an inactive section for plug-ins. There is no real reason why there should be inactive plug-ins on your blog.

WordPress Website Maintenance Checklist image delete plugins

#6. Delete Unwanted Themes

Many Webmasters install new WordPress themes and always forget to actually delete them afterwards. You only really need to keep the one that you are using, and also the default WordPress theme. This is usually used for when your theme crashes, as you can always switch to the default theme.

See the screenshot below. I investigated one of my websites and found eight extra themes installed. This also means that eight of these themes need to be kept up to date as having out of date themes and plug-ins can leave you open to hackers. Therefore it is better to only have the theme you are using, and the default WordPress theme.

WordPress Website Maintenance Checklist image delete themes 300x183

#7. Optimize Your Database Tables

To optimize database tables, I use WP-DBManager. It is a free plugin available from the WordPress Plugin site and it lets you take control of your database. It also allows you to delete unwanted tables but you would have to be careful with this. Using this plugin to optimize your database does really speed up your website. I like to delete old database tables that have been created by plug-ins that are not using any more. If you are not experienced then you should get some help when doing this as you can crash your entire website by deleting the wrong database table.

#8. Delete Spam Comments

Many webmasters do not realize that most of us that own the new

Author: Mitz Pantic

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