5 Essential Tips to Maintain a WordPress Website

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So many website builders came and went but still, WordPress remains the most reliable and user-friendly platform in the world! And if you have a WordPress website, you know that maintaining it is a breeze. 

But no matter how easy to use, reliable, and beautiful your WordPress website is, you can’t just leave it sitting for too long. You have to maintain it and maintain it well if you want to make the most out of it. Why maintain your WP website? Here are 5 reasons why:

• WP database is queried several thousand times per day
• WP site becomes slow and clunky when unmaintained
• WP site becomes prone to hackers when unmaintained
• WP plugins and tools have to be updated or upgraded to work properly
• Improve your brand’s online reputation

So how do you maintain your WordPress website? What essential factors should you consider to keep your website working smoothly? Here are 5 tips: 

5 Essential Tips to Maintain a WordPress Website

Core WordPress Updates

As of writing this, the current WordPress version is 5.8. Depending on your website’s configuration, you’ll need to go to your WP dashboard and update the website manually. WordPress will continually update you with a new version every time there’s one, and you have to keep updating your site often just to make sure it works properly. 

IMPORTANT: Before you hit that update button, back up your website first. This way, you can use the backup to restore your website if something goes wrong during the update. And speaking of backup, back your site up regularly so if you come across glitches during the update, you can always restore the latest version of your website. 

Update the Plugins

Third-party plugins are tools that boost the functionality of your website. And updating these tools is essential to improving the performance of your website. Always use a staging environment to test out the updated plugins. This goes especially for small niche or customized plugins, do your own tests during and after the updates. 

Bulk update sounds good if you’re a weary entrepreneur with a lot of things to do but don’t do it. It will be hard to track down which plugins are having update issues if you updated these tools in bulk. Do the updates one at a time and disable automatic updates for plugins so troubleshooting won’t be too cumbersome when you do it. 

Update the Theme

You’re not changing themes, why update these in the first place? Just like plugins, themes need regular updates too. This goes especially for customized themes; these should continuously be updated to keep your website’s loading speed snappy and the functionality, flawless. Again, test out the updates and if you run across problems with the updates, save your edits. 

Check the Login Security

Don’t leave your website vulnerable to hackers and malicious software programs, strengthen your login security with regular updates. If you’re still pretty lax with your login security, your customers could end up paying the price. Customer data may be compromised, your content could become corrupt. Your site becomes vulnerable to attacks and this will inevitably ruin your brand. You have total control over the admin logins of your website, just edit your Apache/nginx configuration files. 

Do Malware Scans

Malware poses a serious threat to WordPress site owners, and outdated plugins and themes leave your website vulnerable to such attacks. Always scan your website for malware, these nasty codes are good at hiding. A regular malware scan will reveal any malicious codes that are hiding in your website — do this once a week for good measure. Do this especially if you are running an e-commerce website. 

Keeping your website and every tool in it updated is vital to keeping your business running smoothly and snappy. Always keep these maintenance tips in mind to boost the functionality of your website! We also suggest drawing a maintenance schedule just to make sure that you are setting aside time for regular website updates.

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