WordPress maintenance tasks are a chore but they pay off in the long run. How often do you perform WordPress maintenance? Do you keep your website up to date? Both search engines and users love WordPress, but if it is not maintained both search engines and users will stop visiting it. Creating a website is only the first task – achieving success online depends on how involved you are with your website.
Compare your WordPress website to a car. If you do not maintain or lube your car, one day it will stop running. Depending upon the activity of your site, there are some key tasks described below that are an absolute must for optimal performance of your website.
Revision Cleanup: WordPress keeps all revisions that you make to your posts and pages. As your website grows and you write and revise pages and posts some revisions are created. Some revisions are probably not worth keeping. It’s a good policy to remove the unneeded revisions.
Database Repair: Over time your database could become fragmented, corrupted and have unneccessary data. This can slow down your website. Repair and clean up your database periodically.
Trash/Spam clean up: WordPress usually clears out trash and spam 30 days after they are placed there. It is recommended you empty your trash and spam folders right away.
Media cleanup: Between uploading images/replacing images your media library can become bloated. WordPress also creates multiple images for each image you upload. It is essential that you clean up these unwanted, unattached images.
Update Plug-ins: To make your WordPress site secure keep your plug-ins up to date. If your plug-ins are not updated there could be security vulnerabilities.
Update Theme: To ensure security and compatibility it is important you keep your theme up to date. If your website was created by a qualified web designer then most probably they have created a child theme for you. If have not created a child theme and customized your WordPress theme then your customizations will be lost if you overwrite the files. You will have to compare files or review the update log before you update your files.
Always make a backup before you perform any WordPress maintenance tasks!
