7 Smart Ways to Maintain WordPress Website

If you want to host a successful WordPress site, you need to maintain its core functionality, installed plugins/themes, and other aspects on a regular basis. No doubt, WordPress is a great platform, but maintenance is a key that will keep you going longer across the global market.

However, maintaining a WordPress site is one of the tedious tasks, but it will help you know your efficiency, keep you updated with the latest technologies and most importantly, it remains safe and secure. So make sure you follow the right maintenance tactics that will boost the security, performance and functionality of your site to a great extent.

In this post, we will stumble upon the seven WordPress maintenance tips that will help you maintain your WordPress site, without any technical assistance.

Let’s take a look:

1. Backup your site regularly

This is the most vital things that you need to do on a regular basis. Although backing up doesn’t keep your site fresh and clean, it helps if something goes wrong as you can revert to a previous version immediately.

I would suggest you to backup your WordPress site on a monthly basis. You can also backup your blogs daily, while, weekly backups are good for corporate sites. You can backup your site via your hosting provider or by downloading a local copy of your site through FTP.

WordPress offers some stunning plugins that will automatically backup your complete site. VaultPress is a nice WordPress plugin that offers the backup and restoration functionalities on the fly.

2. Keep your site up-to-date

If you want to maintain your site, you should update your core WordPress, installed themes and plugins to its latest version on a frequent basis. Fortunately, WordPress rolls out its latest version 4.6 frequently to offer their users more advanced features and security fixes.

All you need is to log in to your WordPress site on a monthly basis and update the core WP, themes, and plugins.

3. Delete Unused plugins

WordPress plugins are a great way to extend the functionality of the site. But using too many plugins could affect the performance as well as the security of a website.

If you want a successful site, you need to remove all those plugins that you haven’t used till now. In short, get rid of the plugins that you don’t need.

For that, you first need to deactivate the plugin, and then delete it. But before this, take a look at very plugin you have installed to find out the unused plugins.

4. Optimize your database

A database is a place where all your site content is stored. It includes your blog posts, pages, images, videos, setting and much more. As your site grows, your database begins to get bloated, which in turn slow down the speed of your site.

If you want to improve the performance of your site, you need to optimize your database. With the help of WordPress plugin (such as WP-Optimize that will automatically optimize your database and clears records that are now not required), you can optimize the database of your site and enhance its speed.

The plugin will also help you remove spam comments; unwanted draft posts, etc. It also optimizes the underlying MySQL database tables.

5. Focus on your site’s security

Most of the WordPress users overlook the security of their site. But it is one of the crucial factors that need to be considered. If you want to secure your site from hackers and other security threats, you need to install a reliable security plugin. You can use iThemes Security plugin that will protect your site from hackers within a few clicks.

In fact, you should also use a Sucuri service to monitor your site. It will scan your site and detect the malware or virus from your installed themes, plugins or core WordPress. And if any malware is found, it will immediately remove it from your site.

6. Keep an eye on your site’s speed

If you want to attract more visitors, you need to provide them fast loading pages. This means the speed of a site directly affect the ranking of your site on search engines. In fact, Google prefers fast loading sites. So, you should know the loading speed of your site.

Luckily, there is Google’s PageSpeed Insights that offers a tool to grade your site’s load time, and then offers tips to improve it. You can install this tool and improve the performance of your site within a few clicks.

7. Manage user accounts

The security of your site is also based on the aspect that how you manage your user accounts. Most of the website owners doll out their site’s password and leave it vulnerable. If you are a newbie user, you should avoid giving your login details to your multiple users. Each user should have their own login and password details as it gives more security to the site.

Apart from this, make sure you don’t use “admin” username for your WP account. Try to swap the default username with the new and unique one. You can also use the lengthy and difficult-to-break password. Plus, you can also change the URL of your login page if you want to protect your site from hackers and other security threats.

Conclusion

These are some of the great WordPress maintenance tips that will keep your site fresh, clean and updated. You should follow these tips and enhance the functionality of your site for longer.