Announcing Duplicator WP-CLI Commands (And How They Speed Up Backups)
Looking for a smarter way to manage site backups? Explore Duplicator's new features, including customizable WP-CLI commands and permission settings!
Announcing Duplicator WP-CLI Commands (And How They Speed Up Backups)
Joella Dunn
Joella Dunn
John Turner
John Turner
You’ve just launched your WordPress site. Now what?
Like you, I wasn’t sure what kind of upkeep my first WordPress website needed. What tasks are necessary and how often should you do them?
The truth is, your site needs regular care to stay secure, fast, and user-friendly. Neglect can lead to slow loading times, security vulnerabilities, and frustrated visitors.
But with so many tasks to consider, it can be overwhelming to know where to begin.
In this post, we’ll give you some key WordPress maintenance tips!
To get you started, here are some routine weekly, monthly, and yearly maintenance tasks for your WordPress site!
| Weekly | Monthly | Yearly |
| WordPress updates | Check uptime | Renew web hosting |
| Create backups | Monitor performance | Renew domain name |
| Check for loading errors | Scan for malware | Review and refresh web design |
WordPress is a powerful content management system, but it requires regular maintenance to keep it running smoothly. This includes tasks like updating WordPress plugins and themes, fixing security vulnerabilities, and optimizing database queries.
By performing regular maintenance, you can prevent problems and keep your WordPress site up and running. Here are some of the main benefits of regular WordPress maintenance:
Improved security
Keeping your WordPress software, plugins, and themes up to date comes with bug fixes that protect your site from security vulnerabilities.
Increased performance
Optimizing your database and other aspects of your site can improve its loading speed.
Reduced downtime
By fixing problems and preventing them from happening in the first place, you can reduce the amount of downtime your site experiences.
Better user experience
A well-maintained WordPress site will be more user-friendly and enjoyable for visitors.
Now that you know the benefits of performing regular maintenance on your WordPress site, let’s show you how to do it! This way, you’ll have a solid maintenance plan that will boost your performance and security.
As a WordPress site owner, you won’t want to forget to back up your site. In a backup, you’ll save a copy of your current files and database information.
If your website’s server crashes, you could lose all of your data. When you have a recent backup on hand, you can restore your website to the way it was before the disaster, and you won’t have to start from scratch.
Here are some other reasons to back up your website:
The easiest way to back up your website is to install a WordPress backup plugin. If you’re looking for the most beginner-friendly and flexible tool, consider Duplicator Pro.
With Duplicator, you can easily create new backups of your site. It will compile a copy of all of your WordPress files, plugins, themes, media files, and database tables.
As you’re creating a backup, you’ll be able to customize exactly what data to include. Simply use the backup presets and checkboxes.
To save time, you can also set up automatic backups. Duplicator allows you to create hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly auto-backup schedules.
This allows you to take one WordPress website maintenance task off your workload!
Another important maintenance task is performing WordPress updates. If you don’t, you’ll miss out on security upgrades and new features.
Also, search engines consider website performance, security, and compatibility when determining search rankings. By regularly updating your WordPress website, you can maintain a competitive edge, improve your website’s SEO, and attract more organic traffic.
Fortunately, WordPress makes it easy to manage new updates. All you’ll have to do is visit the Updates page in your dashboard.
Here, you can update your plugins, themes, and WordPress version.
Alternatively, your plugin updates will appear on the Plugins page. This allows you to update each one individually.
To update WordPress themes, go to the Themes page. You’ll be able to view information about each update and decide whether or not to go through with it.
Although hackers can access your site through outdated software, you might be vulnerable in other areas. If your passwords are weak, you could be the victim of brute force attacks, malware, and data loss.
To boost your site’s security, make sure you’re using strong and unique passwords for all of these accounts:
However, keep in mind that strong passwords could also become compromised. This is why it’s important to regularly update your passwords.
Any WordPress website will get spam comments at some point. These can contain harmful links or malware, posing a security risk to your website and its visitors.
By deleting these comments, you can clean up your website and protect the safety of your users. You’ll prevent visitors from clicking on malicious links that could compromise their devices or personal information.
To combat comment spam, most site admins use a plugin like Akismet. This tool will automatically review your comments and contact form submissions for spam.
Even with Akismet, some spam comments can fall through the cracks. It’s important to regularly check your comments, mark any spam, and delete it.
Sometimes, you could receive too much spam for you to handle. In that case, you can delete spam comments in bulk.
Your website’s database contains crucial information like your posts, pages, users, comments, and WordPress settings. As your site grows, the database can get more cluttered with unnecessary data.
A bloated or poorly optimized WordPress database can slow down your site, leading to longer loading times and a frustrating user experience. By optimizing the database, you streamline the retrieval and storage of data, resulting in improved site performance.
Plus, a smaller, optimized database is easier to back up and restore. It’ll also make it easier to migrate your website to a new server or hosting provider.
WP-Sweep is a plugin that can instantly optimize your database. It’s capable of cleaning up spam comments, auto drafts, duplicated post meta, and more.
Once installed, WP-Sweep will show you exactly what needs to be optimized on your database. Then, you can clean up these areas with just one click.
By regularly optimizing your database, you’ll make sure that your website continues to operate smoothly!
To ensure your website ranks well in search engine results and attracts organic traffic, it is essential to regularly check your SEO. Here are some things you can do in an SEO audit:
To start analyzing your organic traffic, you can use data from Google Analytics and Google Search Console. If you want to see real-time reports in your WordPress dashboard, MonsterInsights can help.
MonsterInsights is the best WordPress analytics plugin. Once you connect your Google Analytics account, you can view information about how visitors are interacting with your content. This can allow you to boost traffic and conversions.
Using MonsterInsights, you’ll also see a valuable Search Console report. You’ll know what keywords visitors are using to find your site.
Additionally, All in One SEO is a plugin that will give you a full SEO audit checklist. It’ll provide actionable insights on how to improve your overall SEO performance.
Once you edit any post or page, you’ll see a list of basic SEO tasks. This can help you update existing content.
With these tools, you’ll rise to the top of search results!
Images are often the largest elements on a web page, and if they are not optimized, they can significantly slow down your site’s loading speed. Slow-loading pages lead to higher bounce rates, where visitors leave your site before it fully loads.
By optimizing images, you can reduce their file size without compromising visual quality, resulting in faster loading times. This improves user satisfaction and encourages longer page visits.
To make this WordPress site maintenance task easier, you can install an image compression plugin. EWWW Image Optimizer will automatically compress and scale images as you upload them to WordPress.
However, you may already have a huge Media Library of unoptimized images. In this case, you can download all your images and use a third-party service to optimize them.
With Duplicator, create a backup and select the Media Only preset. This will download your Media Library as a zipped backup file.
Then, feel free to run your images through a compression tool like TinyPNG. At this point, you could also migrate your Media Library to a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
Broken links create a frustrating experience for visitors while navigating your website. When users click on a link and end up on a 404 error page, they may perceive your site as unreliable or unprofessional.
As you’re managing your website, you’ll need to monitor the status of your links. If you point to web pages that don’t exist anymore, it’s time to delete or update the link.
Chances are, there are a lot of internal and external links on your website. To find any broken ones, we’d recommend installing Broken Link Checker. This tool automatically scans for broken links and allows you to fix them immediately.
Instead of manually clicking on every link on your site, you’ll see a list of new broken links. Then, you can quickly redirect them to a functioning web page.
Page load speed is a critical factor that affects user engagement, search engine rankings, and conversions. Studies have shown that even a one-second delay in page load time can significantly impact bounce rates and user satisfaction.
If you frequently visit your site’s front end on your computer or phone, you might think it loads fast. However, your browser cache could be misrepresenting your actual loading speed.
To check your site’s performance, try the IsItWP speed test. After you enter your website’s URL, you’ll see information about your loading time, page size, and number of requests.
Keep in mind that your page speed should be under 2 seconds. If it’s significantly higher, you might need to upgrade your hosting plan, install a caching plugin, or clean up your database.
As we mentioned earlier, you’ll need to boost your site security by changing passwords and performing updates. It’s also a good idea to check your access and error logs for any unauthorized or unusual activity.
Additionally, you can consider installing a security audit plugin. Sucuri is a popular option that includes a Website Firewall (WAF), malware scanning, malware removal, uptime monitoring, and other helpful security features.
Whether you’re a blogger or an ecommerce store owner, you probably have a form set up to receive user feedback. However, your form might suddenly stop sending emails.
By routinely testing these forms, you can ensure that visitors can easily engage, provide feedback, make inquiries, or complete transactions. If you notice that one isn’t working, start troubleshooting the issue immediately.
Usually, you can solve issues by switching from the PHP mail() function to SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). This might seem complicated, but the WP Mail SMTP plugin automatically does this for you.
With WP Mail SMTP, you can connect your forms with your favorite SMTP service. Using reliable options like SendLayer, Office365, or Gmail (G Suite), you’ll make sure visitors receive emails after they submit your form.
You can maintain your WordPress site by regularly updating WordPress core, themes, and plugins to the latest versions to ensure security and compatibility. Additionally, perform routine backups, monitor site performance, optimize the database, and regularly scan for malware or security vulnerabilities.
Maintenance is crucial in WordPress to ensure the security, stability, and optimal performance of your website. Without it, you may face poor loading speed, compatibility issues, higher bounce rates, decreased search rankings, and other issues.
No, it’s not difficult to maintain a WordPress website. You can automate many tasks like backups and updates. Plus, there are beginner-friendly plugins that can help you optimize your database, bulk delete spam comments, optimize images, and monitor security.
If you don’t want to install too many plugins, you could find a third-party website maintenance service provider. Companies like WP Buffs and Maintainn have WordPress experts who will take care of updates, backups, and security monitoring for you.
Your backup frequency depends on how often you update your website’s content. If you have a large website with high traffic and a consistent blog posting schedule, you may want to create daily backups. However, static sites only have to be backed up once a month.
If your WordPress site is in maintenance mode, it displays a message that it is “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.” This tells your visitors that you’re fixing a bug or adding tweaks to your web design, without showing them a 404 error.
You can also create a custom maintenance page using a landing page builder like SeedProd. This plugin has pre-made templates for coming soon, maintenance mode, and 404 pages.
After all of these WordPress maintenance tasks, your site will be fully secure and high-performing!
While you’re here, you may also like these WordPress tutorials:
Need to save time by automating site backups? Download Duplicator Pro to easily create automated backup schedules!
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