8 Must-dos to Maintain Your WordPress Website

In this guide, you'll learn the eight must-dos to maintain your WordPress website, the top maintenance checklist, and important tasks

By Claudio Pires
Updated on November 4, 2023
8 Must-dos to Maintain Your WordPress Website

Running a website is not just about publishing content and designing a great outlook. There are many issues required to ensure WordPress runs as stable as possible. This job is to maintain a WordPress website periodically, and if you do not pay attention, the speed of your website will significantly reduce. Luckily, WordPress maintenance tasks are not complex. In this guide, you’ll learn the eight must-dos to maintain your WordPress website, the top maintenance checklist, and tasks.

8 Must-dos to Maintain Your WordPress Website

1. Monitor Page Load Time.

Page load time plays an important role in ensuring the visitor experience. If customers have to load the page for too long, they may get frustrated and give up immediately, which leads to a high bounce rate and directly negatively affects sales conversion rates.

It’s ideal for your website to take less than 2 seconds to download. When you pass this threshold, the longer the timeout is, the easier it will be for the user to exit the page. Therefore, you need to test page-load with a testing tool like Pingdom Tools.

You will need to do this monthly to find out where the error is before it gets worse. If your page does not load quickly, you should apply some tips to speed up the website.  In addition, it’s necessary to consider whether you have selected the right web hosting provider. Preparing even at the first steps of managing a web will help you save time and money.

Specifically, when choosing the right provider and method, you won’t need to change another and thus have a smart and economical way of using capital. Note: Monitor page load time once a week.

2. Delete Draft Posts and Trash to Maintain Your WordPress Website

The longer you run the WordPress site, the more trash can get in there, such as discarded posts, unused posts, and deleted comments. In some cases, these data will slow down the website. As a result, it is better to be cleaned regularly.

This is very simple and can be done right in your admin page. Let’s start with deleted drafts. To remove them, go to the “All Posts” or “All Pages” tab, then select which posts are in the Trash category. If there is something, click on the Trash link. Then, click on the Bulk Actions menu. Select the Delete Permanently option and click the Apply button:

After having cleared the WordPress trash, you can handle comments. This is the same as the post and the page. Thanks to this WordPress maintenance step, your dashboard will be clean. Depending on how much content you publish each month, the frequency of cleanup should vary. Note: Clean once a month, depending on the size of the site.

3. Update Your Plugins and Themes

Plugins and themes are the best when using WordPress. There are thousands of options for you, many of which can add powerful features to your website. Moreover, premium themes and plugins can be purchased at the best price when knowing to hunt hot deals like coupons or discounts from reputable websites like Couponupto.com. Nevertheless, the more plugins you own, the bigger the responsibility of managing is.

If you forget to update your plugins and themes regularly, chances are that they will start to fail at some point because old software may not be compatible with new versions of WordPress or new plugins.

Not only that, outdated plugins and themes can cause holes in your site, which can be taken use of by hackers to inject malicious code. To avoid these problems, you need to look at the Plugins tab, where you can see how many plugin updates are waiting. The same way goes with themes.

In some cases, you can try testing essential themes and plugins in a testing environment before installing officially. It may take a little longer, yet this can help you avoid fixing bugs if new plugins have a problem. Note: Do this when having new updates or at least once a month.

4. Back-Up Your Website

Among WordPress maintenance tasks, backing up your website is a vital thing that helps improve the security and safety of your website. Having a WordPress backup will help you solve a lot of different situations. Finally, a great tip to maintain your WordPress site.

For example, if the website is broken down, you can restore it from your backup. It is also possible if you accidentally delete important information or encounter compatibility issues with the plugin. Most people need to keep a few backups, but few do that. WordPress gives you many options for creating backups, so why not? Note:

As much as possible, at least once a week. In this guide, you’ll learn the eight must-dos to maintain your WordPress website, the top maintenance checklist, and important tasks.

Most pages on your website contain broken links over time, which point to pages within your domain or other sites on the internet. If these links are updated and moved to other links or deleted, they won’t work anymore. A broken link is a serious problem because it leaves visitors unhappy. If a site has too many broken links, users will think the page has long been unmanaged or not regularly updated.

You can take the time to check each link of each page and article manually. However, it won’t be feasible if your website has a lot of content. For large sites, people often will use tools like WP Broken Link Status Checker to check broken links, which is a pretty good WordPress maintenance plugin. Recommended plugins are all free, so they’ll help you save a considerable amount of running your website.

6. Delete the WordPress Cache to Maintain Your WordPress Website

Website caching is the easiest way to speed up your website and improve performance to keep visitors returning. This method helps the browser save a copy on its cache so that it does not have to reload each time the website is loaded. In this guide, you’ll learn the eight must-dos to maintain your WordPress website, the top maintenance checklist, and important tasks.

Despite its convenience, you need to clear your WordPress cache occasionally, especially when you have significant updates on your site. This will help all visitors see the latest version of your website instead of the old version stored on their computer.  If you have a caching plugin, this cache clearing is effortless as most caching plugins have a cache removal feature.

7. Optimize your WordPress Database

WordPress stores website data in the database. Every change you make on the site will be in the database table of WordPress. The problem is as the website gets bigger, the database will grow as well, thus containing a lot of backlogs. The posts or drafts are also in the WordPress database. As a result, he is recommended to maintain your WordPress site.

Therefore, it is best to clean up this extra information. In other words, you will need to optimize the database. You can do this manually in the database by accessing the database right in your control panel. However, the database is an essential and sensitive place, and it will take a long time to find out which table to clean. To save time, you can use the database optimization plugin, such as the WP-Optimize maintenance plugin.

8. Update password WordPress website maintenance checklist

Last but not least, updating your password is a crucial task on the list of effective WordPress operators. You may not know that your password might be somewhere else. So it’s essential to change to a new, unused password. Not everyone obeys this rule.

Although there are many ways to secure your WordPress website, changing the password every month is among the easiest. This method is straightforward yet surprisingly effective, which minimizes the risk of someone accessing your site.

If you haven’t changed your password in a long time because you have trouble remembering a new password, using the password manager is helpful. It will help you create and save complex passwords to be more secure.

Final Thoughts to Maintain Your WordPress Website

Every successful website needs the most care. WordPress maintenance work requires a lot of care behind the scenes. Which ensures your site runs as smoothly as possible. Maintaining WordPress is not a profitable job. So, it will help your website always stand at the best performance in readers’ eyes. In this guide, you’ll learn the eight must-dos to maintain your WordPress website, the top maintenance checklist, and important tasks.

Your site will also look more appealing with tons of stunning WordPress themes from famous providers like Visualmodo. The company also places the user advantages at first care when partnering with Couponupto to provide a flood of Visualmodo coupon codes and discount codes, which allows you to get a real bargain.

Claudio Pires

Claudio Pires is the co-founder of Visualmodo, a renowned company in web development and design. With over 15 years of experience, Claudio has honed his skills in content creation, web development support, and senior web designer. A trilingual expert fluent in English, Portuguese, and Spanish, he brings a global perspective to his work. Beyond his professional endeavors, Claudio is an active YouTuber, sharing his insights and expertise with a broader audience. Based in Brazil, Claudio continues to push the boundaries of web design and digital content, making him a pivotal figure in the industry.