WordPress Maintenance: 7 Tasks You Should Perform Regularly

Your WordPress website needs regular care and attention to stay healthy, secure, and performing at its best. While the basics like backups and updates are essential, certain maintenance tasks often get overlooked but play a crucial role in your site’s overall success. Neglecting these can slow loading times, create security vulnerabilities, and harm user experience that drives visitors away.

In this article, we’ll explore seven maintenance tasks that every WordPress website owner should prioritise, designed to keep your website in top shape and help you avoid costly issues down the line.

We’ll give you our top tips for conducting these checks and updates efficiently and recommend tools that might streamline the process.

Let’s dive in:

7 tasks you should perform regularly to maintain your WordPress website

1. Test your site’s forms and interactive features

Forms and interactive features are the lifelines of user engagement on your WordPress website. They facilitate crucial actions like inquiries through contact forms, newsletter sign-ups via subscription forms, and revenue generation through checkout processes.

Ensuring these elements work flawlessly is vital because they directly impact user satisfaction and your site’s effectiveness in achieving its goals.

If you neglect this maintenance task, you might miss opportunities to connect with potential clients or customers. Malfunctioning checkout processes can lead to abandoned carts and lost revenue. Plus, visitors who encounter errors on your website are likely to leave it and may not return, increasing your bounce rate.

Persistent issues with interactive features can make your website appear unprofessional, harming your brand’s credibility and user engagement metrics (like bounce rate and time on site). These factors are crucial for how your website is ranked in search engines, so they must be protected.

Tips for testing forms and interactive features

In order to complete this maintenance task efficiently, you should first ensure that you have a checklist of all the forms and interactive elements on your website.
Next, remember that functionality can differ across browsers and between devices. So, you should conduct your tests on Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, as well as on desktops, mobiles, and tablets.
These checks can be made more efficient if you automate them. Tools like Selenium or Ghost Inspector can automate the testing process for complex interactive elements.
It’s also useful to make it easy for website users to report any issues they find. If it’s simple for them to do so, you’ll catch bugs faster.

How frequently should you test your forms and interactive features?

It’s recommended to test all forms and interactive features monthly and after every significant update to your WordPress core, themes, or plugins. Additionally, test them whenever you make changes to related content or settings. Regular testing helps you catch issues early before they affect a large portion of your audience.

Tools to help

Services like BrowserStack or CrossBrowserTesting allow you to test your website across different browsers and devices without needing multiple physical devices. Additionally, uptime and functionality monitors like Pingdom or Uptime Robot can be implemented to alert you if a form stops working.

2. Audit your site for broken links

Broken links can significantly impact your website’s performance and reputation by giving the impression that you’re careless. They frustrate visitors who can’t find the content they’re looking for and send negative signals to search engines, potentially harming your SEO rankings.

Visitors encountering broken links may leave your site, reducing engagement and increasing your bounce rate. Plus, if your CTAs or product pages have broken links, you’ll definitely be losing sales.

Regularly auditing for broken links is crucial to maintaining a professional and user-friendly website. So, how best to go about it?

Best practices for link auditing

Automated tools like Broken Link Checker (plugin) or online services such as Screaming Frog can scan your site and provide a report of all broken links, which is by far the most efficient way to do so.
If you need to be quick, make sure to prioritise your key pages (i.e., your homepage, product pages, and landing pages). These will have the most significant impact.
For any deleted pages, set up 301 redirects to guide visitors to alternative, relevant content.
Don’t forget to update external links. These can break over time as other websites change or remove their content, so you must periodically review and update them.

How frequently should you audit your links?

It’s good to perform a broken link audit monthly and after any major content updates, such as deleting or moving pages. Additionally, you could schedule a thorough review before launching new campaigns or promotions to ensure all links are functional.

3. Evaluate your plugin and theme inventory

Your WordPress plugins and themes are essential for functionality and design, but they can also introduce security vulnerabilities and performance issues if left unchecked.

Outdated or unused plugins and themes can act as entry points for hackers while having too many active plugins can slow down your site. Plus, if you update your WordPress core or other plugins, you might inadvertently cause conflicts if there are compatibility issues.

And finally, you should know that unused plugins and themes take up server space and will, therefore, increase the complexity of your site’s management.

Regularly evaluating your inventory ensures a secure, fast, and efficient website. So, what’s the best way to do so?

Conducting an inventory for plugins and themes

Start with an inventory: Make a list of all installed plugins and themes, noting which are actively used and which are not.
Delete what you don’t use: Remove inactive plugins and themes completely. Even inactive items can pose a security risk.
Keep everything updated: Ensure all active plugins, themes, and the WordPress core are updated regularly to benefit from security patches and new features.
Avoid redundancy: Use multipurpose plugins instead of several niche plugins to minimise resource use and reduce conflicts.
Test after updates: After updating, test your site’s functionality to ensure everything works as expected.

How frequently should you do this?

You should review your plugins and themes every three months and after any significant WordPress updates. This ensures compatibility and security while avoiding using up resources unnecessarily.

4. Review and update your content

Your website’s content is the backbone of user engagement and SEO performance. Search engines prioritise fresh, relevant content. Stale content can lead to lower rankings and reduced organic traffic.

Any outdated information or broken promises (e.g., advertising expired promotions) can make your website seem really unreliable. Your content may also fail to capitalise on new trends, keywords, or customer needs, limiting your reach and engagement.

Regularly reviewing and updating your content ensures that it remains accurate, engaging, and aligned with current SEO practices, helping to attract and retain both users and search engines. Here are our top tips:

Top tips for content auditing

Start with high-impact pages: Focus on updating your homepage, landing pages, and blog posts that generate the most traffic or conversions.
Check for accuracy: Remove outdated information, correct inaccuracies, and update any stats, dates, and references to reflect the latest data.
Optimise for SEO: Research current keywords, improve meta descriptions, and ensure your content is structured for search engines and readers.
Add value: Enhance content with new insights, multimedia (images, videos), and links to relevant internal or external resources.
Review calls-to-action (CTAs): Ensure your CTAs reflect your latest offerings, promotions, or goals.

How often should content be reviewed?

Content should be reviewed and updated quarterly or whenever there are significant changes in your industry, business offerings, or SEO trends.

Helpful tools for maintaining your website’s content

Yoast SEO for optimising content for search engines.
Google Analytics or Ahrefs for identifying high-performing and underperforming content.
Grammarly to improve readability and professionalism.
SEMrush to ensure your content aligns with current SEO trends.

5. Monitor and update security measures

Website security is a critical aspect of maintenance that protects your site from hackers, malware, and data breaches. With cyberattacks becoming increasingly sophisticated, even small vulnerabilities can lead to major problems, including stolen user data, website downtime, and damage to your reputation.

Don’t forget that search engines also penalise compromised websites, causing your site to drop in rankings and lose organic traffic. And if your site is hacked, fixing it will likely be more expensive and time-consuming than preventing an attack in the first place.

So, regular monitoring and updates to your security measures will keep your site safe and your visitors confident in using it. How should you approach this?

Website security maintenance best practices

Use security plugins to log all login attempts, file changes, and unusual activity. Regularly review these logs for anomalies.
Use strong, unique passwords for all admin accounts and change them periodically.
Ensure your firewall is active and your security plugins are up to date. Test their effectiveness by running vulnerability scans.
Use automated tools to scan your site for malware and quickly address any threats detected.
Ensure your SSL certificate is valid, as an expired certificate can make your site appear insecure to visitors and search engines.

How frequently should security be checked?

Weekly: monitor security logs and login attempts.
Monthly: update passwords, firewalls, and security plugins.
Quarterly: Run a full malware scan and review your SSL certificate status (more frequently if your site handles sensitive user data).

Plus, you might find these tools useful:

Wordfence for logging, malware scans, and firewalls.
Let’s Encrypt to help monitor and renew your SSL certificate.
LastPass to generate and manage strong passwords securely.
MalCare for automated malware detection and removal.

6. Optimise and clean the database

Your WordPress database stores all the information your site needs to function, including posts, comments, and plugin settings. Over time, this database can become cluttered with unnecessary data like spam comments, old post revisions, and transient options, which can slow down your website and increase server load. Larger databases also consume more server resources, which can raise hosting costs.

Regular optimisation will keep your database lean, improving site performance and reducing page load times. So, how can you maintain your database effectively?

Tips for optimising your site database

We recommend that you:

Delete unused data: Remove spam comments, trashed posts, and unnecessary revisions. (But be cautious not to delete data you might need down the line.)
Optimise database tables: Use database optimisation tools to clean up and reorganise your tables for better performance (see tools below).
Automate cleanup: Schedule automatic database cleanups using plugins to save time and ensure consistency.
Monitor impact: After optimising, test your site’s speed using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to measure improvements.
Compress media files: Large images and videos can strain your site’s database. Use compression tools to optimise them without sacrificing quality.

How frequently should you clean your database?

Clean and optimise your database monthly, or more frequently if your site has high traffic or generates large amounts of content.

Tools to help clean up your database:

Plugins like WP-Optimize can automate the process of removing unnecessary data and optimising tables.
Tools like TinyPNG can compress images and reduce file sizes.
Before making major changes, back up your database with a tool like UpdraftPlus.
After optimising, use tools like Pingdom to assess site performance and loading times.

7. Backup your site and test restorations

Regular backups are your safety net in case of unexpected problems, such as hacking, server crashes, or accidental data loss. Without a recent backup, restoring your website after an issue can be time-consuming, expensive, or even impossible. Testing your backup restoration process is equally important – having backups is useless if they’re corrupted or incomplete when needed.

Best practices for backing up your website

Here are our top tips:

Automate the process: Use reliable backup plugins to schedule automatic backups of your files and database.
Store backups securely: Save backups off-site or in the cloud using services like Google Drive (storing them on the same server as your site exposes them to the same risks).
Retain multiple copies: Keep multiple versions of backups to ensure you can restore your site to a specific point in time.
Test restorations: Set up a staging environment to test restoring your backups without affecting the live site.
Document the process: Maintain clear documentation for the restoration process so you or your team can act quickly in case of an emergency.

How frequently should you back up your site?

Weekly: Schedule automated backups. Do this more frequently if your site updates regularly (e.g., daily for e-commerce sites).
Quarterly: Test the restore process quarterly or after significant changes to ensure backups are functional.

Tools to help with backups:

Tools like UpdraftPlus or BackupBuddy make automating and managing backups easy.
Something like Google Drive for secure off-site storage.
Platforms like WP Staging can help test backup restorations safely.

Final thoughts

Website maintenance is a multifaceted process; breaking things down into easy subtasks is a must.

If you want help with maintaining your site, reach out to us here at purpleplanet. Our purpletools service includes nightly backups, automatic updates, SEO reports, malware monitoring, website analytics, and database optimisation.

Get in touch