Even as we enter in 2018, the popularity of WordPress doesn’t seem to diminish and rightly so! WordPress is the #1 CMS to build a blog or a website with. It is free to use, open source and is flexible enough to build any kind of website or blog you desire. Its flexibility is largely due to the availability of a wide variety of responsive WordPress themes and with ample of WordPress plugins to use, both free and premium, one can add additional functionality to their website without any hassle.
WordPress offers you airtight security, ample of SEO tools to optimize your website and has integrated social media and blogging feature that helps make your website all the more interactive. However, while creating a WordPress website is easy, ensuring that it is well-maintained at all times can be a daunting task. As such, here is an infographic that has listed the Top 50+ best practices to maintain your WordPress website effectively.
But, before we take a look at the infographic, let’s first take a look at some of the most crucial website maintenance tasks that you need to do on a daily basis.
1. Take a Backup and Monitor Your Site’s Security
When speaking about maintenance, backing up your site and monitoring your site’s security takes top priority. Scanning your site daily for malware, viruses, spam and other threats is important in order to ensure that all your hard work is safe and secure. Similarly, taking a daily backup is essential, as it would help you restore your site to the current state in the event of hacking or server crash. Best part, there are an array of plugins available for both – backup and security – the top being BackWPUp & BackupBuddy and iThemes Security & Wordfence Security respectively.
2. Test Your Site’s Speed
If you have been running a website for a while now, you would be aware of the importance of a faster website speed. Be it load time or page speed, one needs to ensure that it is optimal at all times, as sluggish website performance leads to a poor user experience, leading to lower ranking on SERPs. As part of the website maintenance, you need to check your site’s speed daily and you can easily achieve this task by testing your site with effective tools such as GTmetrix and PageSpeed Insights.
3. Check Your Site’s On-page SEO
If you are not up-to-date as to what are the latest addition to SEO or what techniques have become redundant then chances of you committing common SEO mistakes are high. Implementing the best SEO practices on your website is important in order to make your site user and search engine friendly. As such, reviewing your site’s on-page SEO should be a part of your website maintenance checklist, as an unoptimized site leads to a higher bounce rate, which could hurt your site’s overall ranking and conversion rate.
4. Find and Fix Broken Links
Too many broken links or 404 error pages is a sign of an unkempt website. This affects your site’s credibility, as users are likely to assume that you are not serious about your business. It will hurt your site’s ranking on SERPs, as Google frowns upon dead links. Moreover, since broken links halt search engine robots from indexing your site accurately, it will further diminish your site’s chances of appearing in the top 10 search result. Thus, it is important to scan and fix broken links on your website and to perform this task, you can make use of the powerful WordPress plugin – Broken Link Checker.
5. Delete/Update WordPress Plugins & Themes
In order to ensure that your site is well-secured, WordPress provides you with regular updates for all WordPress plugins and themes. Failure to update them leaves your site vulnerable to potential hacks and as such, from a security point of view, you need to make sure that you update these as soon as an update is available. Likewise, to improve website speed and functionality, it is essential that you delete unwanted plugins and themes, as this helps clear the unnecessary clutter, thereby helping you optimize your database.
6. Check Your Site’s Web Hosting Resources
Keeping an eye on your web hosting resources is another important website maintenance task. To avoid issues like downtime and any other irregularities that could majorly hurt your site ROI, checking your site’s web hosting resources – uptime, bandwidth, storage space etc, frequently is extremely crucial.
These were just a few of the important website maintenance tasks. To learn more about how to maintain your WordPress website effectively, check out this infographic below. For reference purposes, you can also download a free PDF of this guide and keep it handy. So, take a look now at this WordPress website maintenance infographic and make the most of it!
WordPress Website Maintenance Checklist (Infographic) – 50+ Essential Tips & Practices by the team at bigrockcoupon.in 
