Top 5 WordPress Maintenance Tips

We’ve been taking a look at some of the most exciting grid plugins for the last couple of posts, but to use a production-grade WordPress site, you really need to know how to properly maintain it.
When you install WordPress on a new site, everything is fine and dandy, and you see everything is updated, but then you sign out and forget about the website; fast forward a couple of months, and you come back to the website only to see that it is in dire need of maintenance, you do something you think should not be a problem, but then you can’t access the website anymore. Yes, we’ve all been there. But with these tips and tricks, this will not happen ever again.
Let’s get down to how to maintain WordPress properly. The tips here are organized in most crucial advice first order:

Update Regularly

The majority of WordPress hacks occur when you do not update. While WordPress is highly secure in and of itself, when a new version of WordPress gets released, they publish a list of fixes. If you do not update your WordPress, a malicious actor can notice that your website does not have security against the latest WordPress security issue. Thus they now have an attack vector to attack your website. To protect against these kinds of attack, you need to be continuously updated.

To further drill this point in your mind, look at this article that talks about a REST API vulnerability in WordPress that would not have been an issue if WordPress was updated to 4.7.2.
But updating WordPress is not limited to software updates only. You also need to update your plugin and themes. Plugins update ensure that you always have protection against the latest vulnerability. The same goes for themes.
Get used to visit Dashboard > Updates often; this will save you many headaches down the line.

Backup Regularly

Hopefully, you won’t ever need a backup. But your WordPress site’s maintainability should not rely on hopes and dreams. Keep regular backup and don’t heed to the people that say otherwise. That being said, taking backup is not the only thing you need to do. You need to ensure 2 things. They are:

• Make sure your backup work. Too many companies take backup with the wrong configuration and thus fall prey to complacency. Don’t be that person.
• Make sure your backups are at your fingertip when you need them.

For the first issue, testing backups on a test website is an excellent strategy.
To ensure high availability of your backup, do the following:

• Keep three backups of your website.
• Keep two backups on-premise. One in computer and another one in an external storage medium is a good option.
• Store one backup in a cloud location like Dropbox or Google Drive.

Keeping backups of various time is very important. If you encounter a problem in a live site and all your backups have the same issue, the backups will not help.

Optimize and Clean Database

Just like dust that accumulates in your new house, the WordPress database gets untidy as time goes on. You don’t have to do anything for this to happen, just like you don’t have to do anything to attract dust in your house.
Each post revision, creation and deletion of tables, spam comment and likes create an issue on your database. While the event itself is not a big issue, a collection of events can lead to many issues.
But with plugins like WP-Sweep, you can quickly solve this issue. There is no configuration necessary for this plugin; you can install it and go to Tools → Sweep and start cleaning up tables.

Keep an eye on the spam comment section

WordPress’s spam filters are helpful, mostly. While they can be beneficial in blocking bots’ comments, they can sometimes be overly jealous and block helpful comments. You should always keep an eye out to ensure this does not happen. So from time to time, check the spam section.

Ensure optimum page load times for your website

When starting a new website, most website owners read up on few articles about speeding up their website, implements the suggestions, and call it a day.
But optimizing page load time is an ongoing process. Not a one-and-done kind of thing. Your website can slow down in the future due to a myriad of factors, from a borked plugin update to your hosting changing some knobs in their servers. You should always test your website’s page load performance periodically and use a tool to assist you in this process. We suggest you use Pingdom. It only requires minimal input from you, and you will know that your website is still fast.