Whilst there are many products and services that help you maintain your WordPress websites, you still need to spend time ensuring that everything is ticking over.

Below is a list of essential WordPress tasks that every WordPress user should make a priority.

 

Software Updates

When it comes to updates, WordPress is miles ahead of its competition. The platform supports automatic background updates so that minor and major core updates can be processed behind the scenes.

Whilst theme and plugin updates can also be updated in the background, it is better to perform updates manually through the WordPress admin area so that you can check that the upgrades went ahead with no problems. A simple error in an updated WordPress theme or plugin can be enough to crash your website, which makes updating them automatically risky.

Keeping WordPress up to date is one of the simplest administrative tasks for a WordPress user, however it is also one of the most important.

 

Uptime Monitoring

The longer a website remains offline, the more traffic and revenue your business will lose. You therefore want to be informed about any downtime immediately.

There are a number of uptime monitoring services available online that will inform you when your website goes offline so that you can investigate an error on your website as soon as possible.

Uptime Monitoring services such as Uptime Robot will inform you when your website goes offline.

 

Security and Cleanups

As a WordPress website owner, you need to stay vigilant and ensure that WordPress is always up to date. You also need to ensure that your themes and plugins are up to date and do not have any security holes or vulnerabilities.

WordPress websites are constantly under threat from hackers who want to steal information or install malware on your website. Failure to be proactive about the security of your website is guaranteed to increase your risk of an attack.

 

Backups and Restores

Do not become complacent and assume that nothing will go wrong. It can and it will.

Even experienced WordPress website owners need to revert to external backups to restore their website from time to time. This may be necessary due to your hosting company’s server going down, your website being hacked, or simply because you made a mistake when administrating your website.

Backup your website regularly to ensure that anything goes wrong, you do not lose all of your data.

VaultPress is a premium WordPress backup and restore service from Automattic.

 

Spam Cleaning

Spam is a major problem for all websites. Even if you disable registration in WordPress, adopt a strict commenting policy, and use a good anti-spam WordPress plugin, a lot of spam is still going to get through.

Spam cleaning is a boring unrewarding task, but it is something that unfortunately needs to be done.

Spam Comments Cleaner is an effective solution for removing unwanted spam.

 

Website Performance

A slow loading website will make people click the back button on their browser. Since website speed is a ranking factor, poor performance will also affect your search engine ranking and reduce the amount of organic traffic your website receives.

It is therefore imperative that you optimize your WordPress websites

You can optimize your website in a number of ways. This includes database optimization (e.g. less revisions), page caching, and utilizing a content delivery network.

Cache Enabler generates static HTML pages of your website in order to drastically improve performance.

 

Regular Checkups

Things can go wrong and things will go wrong.

Even when your WordPress websites have been set up correctly and optimized, you still need to regularly check your website to ensure that everything is OK.

 

Have you performed any if these WordPress tasks? Share your experience in the comment section!