Essential WordPress Maintenance Tasks You Should Do Every Month

Your WordPress website needs monthly maintenance, which will ensure it runs securely and smoothly! However, data reveals that around 70% of WordPress websites fail or experience problems because owners ignore ongoing maintenance. Neglecting ongoing maintenance can not just hamper the performance and relevancy of your WordPress site, but will also expose it to security vulnerabilities. 

This article intends to guide you on some of the most essential maintenance tasks you should practice for your WordPress site every month or a  WordPress website development agency can   help you with the same:-  

1. Update WordPress Core, Themes, and Plugins

If you have outdated files embedded in your WordPress website, it poses top security risks and performance downfalls. Therefore, you ought to update the core, plugins, and themes of your WordPress site regularly to ensure it stays protected, stable, and functional over time. 

Some of the crucial attributes you need to focus on in the process are:

• Minor maintenance and security releases must be addressed and updated to keep the WordPress core stable. 
• Check for updates of your themes, plugins, and core files every month. However, remember to create a backup of your site every time before you install major updates. 
• Prioritize updating the latest version of your active theme. 
• Free up the server clutter by removing the unused plugins and themes. 

2. Create Backups of Your WordPress Website

You ought to have backups of your WordPress website, and you must create them every month!. It will help you save a lot of hours of work if anything goes wrong, and files, themes, or data of your site get corrupted. You can either set up automatic monthly backups or create them manually every month. 

Some of the things you must take into account while creating backups of your WordPress site are:

• Create full site backups, inclusive of all files and the database. Use the plugin “Updraft” to help you in the quest. 
• Create off-site store backups using Dropbox, Google Drive, or cloud storage. 
• Verify your backups and make sure they are restorable.

3. Test Website Performance

The speed of your WordPress site directly affects the SEO, UX, and conversion rates. Most users often optimize their WordPress site performance only while deploying or launching it, and then forget to revisit. Over time, when you add new content, integrate plugins, or make theme changes, the site’s performance gets affected at a slow pace. 

By the time you start to notice, the damage to user experience will have already been done! You must conduct timely performance checks to ensure your site continues to perform well, and also ensure that technical SEO is accepted by Google. Here are a few things for reviewing the performance of your WordPress site and improving it:

• Test the page speed of your WordPress site for both the mobile and desktop versions. 
• Check the Core Web Vitals of your WordPress site, which will help you get an insight into LCP, INP, CLS, and others, using tools like GTmetrix, Google Page Insights, and Google Search Console. 
• Identify your render-blocking resources, such as the JS files, CSS files, and certain web fonts. These resources increase the FCP time and reduce the PageSpeed score. Identifying and rectifying such resources to improve the overall page loading experience for users. : 

• Don’t just test the performance of your homepage, but also evaluate the important pages and popular content. 
• Use dedicated tools to identify unoptimized images and use plugins like Smush or EWWW Image Optimizer for automatically optimizing them in supported and performance-friendly formats like WebP. 

4. Clear Your Website Cache

Your site’s cached data can, at times, become corrupted or outdated, which will lead to slower loading times and display issues. Clearing the cache every month will ensure your site performs well, and visitors continue to see only the updated content. 

Some of the things you can do as part of this WordPress maintenance effort are:

• Purge the site cache on the server, and reset everything that’s created by your plugins. 
• After the cache is cleared, you must conduct performance checks to confirm the expected improvements. 
• You can use plugins such as W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache to help you with the process. 

5. Optimizing the Database

Over time, your database will continue to accumulate unwanted or non-essential data such as spam comments, trashed items, or post revisions. Ignoring them can lead your website to slow down, causing performance and responsiveness issues. 

Therefore, you must optimize your database every month to rule out this potential setback. For that, you must:

• Back up your database as a safety precaution, using adequate tools. 
• Use a plugin such as WP-Optimize, which will help you quickly clean any unnecessary data and also optimize the data tables. 

6. Check for Any Broken Links

Broken links on your WordPress website can adversely affect the SEO and user experience, which will increase bounce rates and lower the site rankings. Use a dedicated plugin such as Broken Link Checker, and use it to periodically identify any broken links on your website. 

Such a plugin will run automated checks for catching broken links in the future, alerting you right at the moment. This will ensure your website continues to deliver a good user experience at all times. 

7. Review Your Site’s Security Logs

This is one thing you mustn’t ignore at any cost, as your website’s health, performance, and credibility depend on it. Every month, you must monitor the internal health of your WordPress website to identify any potential performance or security issues that might need your attention. 

To establish strong security for your WordPress website, you can use a plugin called Sucuri, which will protect all your login pages, scan the site for malware, create firewalls, and generate reports on potential threats.

8. Submit Your Sitemap Regularly

You must regularly submit your sitemap, as it improves your indexing, online visibility, and search engine ranking. The purpose of this maintenance task is to ensure the search engines continue to find your content and index it efficiently. 

• Generate your updated sitemap using a tool like Yoast SEO. 
• Submit the same to the search engines using webmaster tools such as Google Search Console. 
• Verify if your pages are being efficiently indexed and crawled by the search engines for maximizing your search engine visibility. 

Here’s a table that briefly summarizes the important tasks and tools for WordPress website maintenance

Monthly Backups	Updraft, Google Drive, AWS S3, Dropbox, Hosting Provider
Coreweb Vitals Check	GT Matrix, Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse
Image Optimization	Smush, Imagify, EWWW
Cache Management	WP Rocket, WP Super Cache, Succuri
Security Management	Succuri, Wordfence
Broken Link Checker	Screaming Frog, Ahrefs
SEO maintenance	SEO Yoast, Ahrefs

Conclusion

When you conduct regular and monthly maintenance of your WordPress, you will be aware of your site’s health, performance, security, and user experience quotient. Neglecting it might cause serious loss to your business in the long run, leading to costly fixes. 

Therefore, you ought to handle the maintenance tasks specified above to ensure your WordPress site continues to deliver continued high performance. However, as your site grows, you will need to keep up with complex maintenance tasks, and seeking professional help can be the best bet for you.