Your website is like any machine which requires regular maintenance. It is critical for the longevity and health of your website. It’s all about spotting issues early on, fixing them promptly, and ensuring your website remains operational and beneficial. Practically, you cannot handle these website maintenance tasks on your own, you’ll need a professional website maintenance company in Waterford to help you out.
In this post, we’ve put together a handy checklist to guide you through the process and make sure your site is always up-to-date, secure, and runs smoothly.
So, let’s dive in and keep your website in tip-top shape!
Update WordPress core to the latest version
It is vital to ensure your WordPress website has all necessary new features, improvements, and security patches provided offered by the WordPress community as it enhances the e stability, performance and security of your website.
Update themes to the latest versions
It ensures compatibility with the latest WordPress features, bug fixes, and security enhancements, as well as o benefiting from potential performance optimizations and new design options.
Update plugins to the latest versions
Updating plugins to their latest versions ensures that your website has access to new functionalities, bug fixes, and security patches, reducing the risk of vulnerabilities and ensuring optimal compatibility with the WordPress environment.
Remove unused themes and plugins
Presence of unused plugins increases the risk of security vulnerabilities, declutters your website’s backend, and improves overall performance by eliminating unnecessary code and resources.
Checking plugins compatibility with theme
It is critical to ensure plugin’s compatibility with the latest WordPress version so that your website functions smoothly and without any conflicts.
Backup your website files and database
Taking backups of your website files and database is vital for your security and prevents from potential data loss, server failures, or security breaches.
Test your backups to ensure they are working properly
Restore backups to a separate environment helps validate their integrity while ensuring you have a proper backup strategy at place. It also minimizes the risk of data loss.
Monitor website uptime and performance
It helps track and identify any instances of downtime or slow loading speeds, enabling you to take proactive measures to minimize disruptions, optimize user experience, and address potential issues promptly.
Regularly scan
It is essential for malware, vulnerabilities, and breaches, ensuring SSL certificates are up to date to protect sensitive data and maintain a secure website environment.
Performance Optimization
It requires constantly optimizing website speed and performance by optimizing images, cleaning databases, implementing caching, and minimizing CSS and JavaScript files.
10 Content Management and SEO
Review and update website content for accuracy, relevance, and SEO optimization, including meta tags, permalink structure, sitemaps, and internal/external links.
User Experience and Functionality
Test and ensure proper functioning of forms, contact pages, search functionality, comment sections, social media sharing, mobile responsiveness, and navigation menus.
12. Analytics and Reporting
Monitor website traffic, user behavior, server resources, and set up goals using analytics tools to track website performance and make informed decisions.
Server and Technical Settings
Monitor server resources, optimize DNS settings, manage file permissions, handle redirects, and configure server response time for efficient website operations.
User Roles and Security
Manage user roles, permissions, registration settings, comment spam filters, and user-generated content policies to maintain website security and integrity.
Review and update your website’s sidebar and widget areas
Periodically review and update your website’s sidebar and widget areas helps display relevant and useful information, eliminating outdated content or widgets, by optimizing the use of space, and enhancing overall website aesthetics and functionality.
Optimize your website’s database by cleaning up unused data
Database needs to be cleaned regularly by removing unnecessary or unused data, such as old revisions, spam comments, or expired transients. It helps improve database performance, reduces storage space requirements, and contributes to faster website loading times.
Check and update your website’s robots.txt file
Keep checking your website’s robots.txt file and know how to control how search engines crawl and index your website. It ensures important pages are accessible while restricting access to sensitive or irrelevant content. This helps improve search engine visibility and protecting sensitive information.
Are You Overwhelmed? Native Web Solutions is there to help you
I feel you may be afraid seeing the detailed checklist. It is to be remembered not all of these tasks need to performed daily, weekly or monthly. We know when to perform these tasks. Our website maintenance services in Waterford, Ireland is designed to take care of your site’s upkeep.