Regular WordPress maintenance boosts a site’s overall performance by improving SEO, user experience and increases security against hackers. If you ignore your WordPress website’s maintenance, your site won’t rank high in search engines, and page load time will increase, leading to a bad user experience and leaving your site susceptible to cyber attacks. In this article, we’ll outline crucial WordPress maintenance tips.
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Check and optimize your site for speed
When website users have to wait longer for your site to load, they immediately leave to a competitor’s site. Regularly check and optimize your WordPress site for speed through caching, which prevents data redundancy. Installing plugins on your WordPress website helps you to enable caching.
You can also optimize your images to boost site speed through the compression technique, which involves reducing the size of your images without affecting their quality. Lazy loading, which involves deferring the loading of some resources until they’re needed, is also an excellent way to boost your site’s load time.
Additionally, your choice for a web host service significantly affects your WordPress site speed, which is why you should go through a website hosting review before making your decision. Optimizing your site for speed will help retain visitors, rank high on SERPs, boost site SEO, and improve customer experience.
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Fix or remove broken links
Broken links take readers to web pages that no longer exist because the site’s URL structure was changed or the web page was moved, and no redirect was added. Your site’s internal and external links affect on-page SEO and search engine rankings. It is advisable to either remove or build bad links. If the broken external links lead to authoritative sites whose business is closely related to yours, consider creating content relevant to what the original link contained and backlink it to your WordPress site. Remove the broken external links that lead to spammy websites.
Additionally, consider creating relevant content for the broken links within your WordPress website. The content you write for the links should be relevant to what the user was reading to create flow. Since manually monitoring broken links is nearly impossible, consider using free broken link checkers.
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Backup your WordPress website
Backing up your WordPress website comes in handy, especially when your site crashes, which may result in data loss, or a specific update leads to loss of important information. It saves you from building a new website from scratch by providing you with a backup version that you can restore.
To create a backup, go to the WordPress root directory, where all the files that make your site work, such as plugins and media files, are stored. You can use your WordPress backup plugins to choose the files you wish to back up. If you have a reliable web host, they can offer you automatic WordPress site backups. This means you don’t have to store your data using plugins manually. Ensure that you create backups for your WordPress website each time you have new data that you feel should be backed up.
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Regularly update your WordPress website
Owing to the continuous improvement in technology, new and advanced WordPress website themes and software are continually developed. When you keep using outdated software, your site slows down, you risk running into bug issues, and your site’s security is threatened.
Updating your WordPress website ensures that it performs optimally to offer customization options, quick fixes for bugs and problems that a previous update might have caused. It also ensures that your site is updated with new technology, or advanced security features against cyberattacks. Updating your WordPress site’s features to more modern ones gives your visitors a good user experience. To make your site more secure and improve its performance, constantly upgrade your WordPress platform, plugins, and theme.
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Manage your WordPress site comments
Comments in WordPress enable your site visitors to have discussions with you or amongst themselves. WordPress offers you options to customize the way you receive comments or change how your site displays comments. All comments on your WordPress site are displayed by default on the comments dashboard, where you can view and manage approved, pending, spam, and trash messages. Be sure to select discussion settings on your menu to restrict comments and protect your WordPress site from spam. Setting comment rules will allow you to disable comments whenever you don’t need them.
WordPress offers you other comment options such as comment display, spam, and administration to enable you to customize your comment section. Enabling comments allows you to build an online community through the discussions you and visitors have. However, WordPress gives you the power to control those discussions through comment customization.
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Regularly check and optimize your WordPress website for mobile devices
When you optimize your WordPress website for mobile devices, user experience improves as more visitors can reach you on the go and at any time, which increases your site’s chances of ranking high on SERPs. To make your website mobile-friendly, use a responsive WordPress theme that adapts to any screen size while maintaining quality for all users. Enabling Google accelerated mobile pages on your WordPress website allows mobile device web pages to load fast, improving user experience. If you cannot set up a responsive WordPress theme, go for WordPress mobile optimization plugins to create a mobile-friendly website. However, the customization options for plugins are limited.
Additionally, the use of full-screen pop-ups can annoy mobile users, frustrating the user experience. To hide these pop-ups, use mobile-friendly WordPress plugins for pop-ups to reduce user frustration and have visitors stay longer on your website. To ensure that your WordPress website is always mobile-friendly, you can use Google’s mobile-friendly test tool to determine the site areas that need improvement and highlight the areas that take a long to load. This will help you act quickly to ensure that your visitors have the best user experience.
Endnote
Your WordPress website is your digital storefront, and its performance may build or break your site’s reputation, which is why regular maintenance is vital. These tips will help you maintain your WordPress website for improved performance.