Performing regular maintenance on your WordPress site is crucial to keeping your site healthy and running smoothly. The only problem is that keeping your site in prime condition takes a lot of time! Completing all of the necessary maintenance tasks quickly adds up.
What is WordPress Website Maintenance?
In short, WordPress maintenance refers to a variety of tasks used to continually monitor and improve the performance, security and quality of your WordPress site.
Your website requires ongoing attention. These tasks may come up monthly, weekly, or even daily.
In general, maintenance services include:
- Updating WordPress core files: WordPress is constantly being updated to fix bugs such as security vulnerabilities. You should stay updated with the latest version to ensure that your site is as safe as possible.
- Keeping themes files up to date: WordPress theme files need to be updated on a regular schedule. This includes updates to stay compatible with the latest version of WordPress. It’s important to keep up with the latest versions of your themes to benefit from these upgrades.
- Keeping plugin files up to date: WordPress plugin files need to be updated on a regular schedule. This includes updates to stay compatible with other plugins, as well as the latest version of WordPress. It’s important to keep up with the latest versions of your plugins to benefit from these upgrades and keep your site running properly.
- Keeping security software up to date: WordPress security is more important today than at any other time in history. They number of brute force attacks and malicious code insertion attempts numbers in the tens of millions every month. If your WordPress security software is not maintained and updated, you could be vulnerable to a catastrophic event. WordPress security software needs to be updated on a regular schedule.
- Clearing your cache: For websites, caches are saved files that can help your site to load faster. Over time, cached files can start to build up and cause site bloat. The server cache should be cleared periodically to reset things and keep your site running smoothly.
- Optimizing your database: Your WordPress database is a set of structured data at the core of your site. It contains user roles, post information, and other site data. As time passes, the database can collect unnecessary information, such as trashed posts, temporary and deleted, etc. Optimizing your database clears this excess data. This can help your site load faster and keep your site’s size down.
- Monthly reporting: New this year is our monthly WP maintenance reporting feature. Starting mid-2021 we will be sending monthly maintenance reports via email to all of our WP maintenance clients on the first of each month. These reports will list the site updates that we performed on your behalf. You will be able to see exactly what work has been done in a given month with itemized details of which files have been updated.
- Other tasks we perform: There are many other small and less frequently needed tasks that also require attention, such as clearing out your Media Library, deleting spam comments, and fixing broken links. These examples just scratch the surface – the list goes on!
Why WordPress Maintenance Is Critical to Your Site’s Success
As we just discussed, WordPress maintenance tasks are important to keeping your site running smoothly. The benefit of performing regular maintenance includes added security, enhanced functionality and improved load times.
Regular maintenance can even boost your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) since search engines favor sites that load fast and are easy to use. A site that loads slowly and contains errors such as broken links appears less trustworthy. These things can cause users to abandon your site.
Additionally, internet users have short attention spans. If they can’t quickly find what they are looking for, users are more likely to bounce. They would prefer to leave your site to easily accomplish their goals elsewhere rather than poke around on your site for long periods of time without success.
To that end, maintenance can even impact your conversion rate. By keeping your site professional and usable, you maximize your chances of engaging visitors so that they’re more likely to become returning users.
However, maintaining a WordPress website on your own is an arduous task. It requires frequent–and sometimes daily–monitoring. Running a business is challenging enough without having to deal with your website every day.
Fortunately, we offer WordPress maintenance services to our clients that are designed to take on the grunt work so that you don’t have to.
Final Thoughts on Maintaining Your Website
It’s a given that you must keep your WordPress site up to date, including performing regular maintenance. Whether you make time for it or not, your site will constantly be in need of updates and tweaks. That’s just how website ownership works!
Website maintenance ensures that your site is as up-to-date and secure as possible, which is fundamental to a successful site and business. So, managing your site isn’t optional – you must prioritize it.
Although staying on top of these tasks is cumbersome, outsourcing to a qualified WordPress maintenance service enables you to focus on what you do best: running your business.
