Brush your teeth and floss. We’re told to do this twice a day to maintain optimum gum health and prevent tooth decay. Without regular brushing and flossing, plague builds on our teeth and it becomes harder and harder for your teeth and gums to stay healthy. And often more and more expensive and time consuming to fix.
Maintaining a website is just the same. You need to perform regular maintenance to keep it running properly and stay speedy and secure. If you neglect regular maintenance, your website’s health will slowly decline causing a multitude of issues that can become costly and time consuming to correct.
The main components of your WordPress site that need updating regularly are the WordPress core, themes and plugins. It’s important to stay on top of WordPress updates to avoid the following issues:
- Slow loading times
- Damaged functionality
- Infecting your visitors’ computers with malware
- Becoming delisted from search engines
- A poor experience for your visitors
Some of the most common WordPress maintenance tasks the require attention are listed below.
WordPress Core Updates
New features are added and regularly improved within WordPress and if your WordPress Core is not up to date, your website slowly becomes less secure and stable. This will lead to a poor experience for your visitors and can negatively impact your search engine ranking.
WordPress Theme Updates
Themes are the framework that make up your sites design and performance. Like the WordPress Core, Themes are regularly updated for security reasons and performance. If you’re using an out of date theme, it will limit its function and security which is why you need to check frequently for updates.
WordPress Plugin Updates
Plugins can be added to your WordPress site to increase its functionality – from creating forms to adding visual effects. Out of date plugins can cause security issues and malfunctions on your website and should be monitored to ensure you’re using the latest version.
Unused plugins should also be regularly removed as they can cause problems with your site’s speed and function, leading to a detrimental user experience and search engine rankings.
WordPress Security Monitoring & Protection
Apart from negatively impacting your reputation and potentially harming your visitors, search engines blacklist a malware infected website leaving it virtually invisible to search traffic. Taking the necessary precautions to protect your site from vulnerabilities is vital to staying visible and keeping your customers safe.
Broken link Repair
Checking your links regularly helps to ensure that visitors can easily navigate your site, leading to a better user experience. Broken links can also negatively impact your search engine rankings as it gives the impression that your site is poorly maintained and not kept up to date.
Testing and repairing links is an important part of your website maintenance checklist and should be carried out every couple of months.
These are just some of the many maintenance tasks that are important on any site. And just like brushing and flossing, when you do something regularly it becomes more manageable to stay on top of. It’s possible to perform all the maintenance updates yourself, but it can be time consuming and risky when you don’t know how to do it properly, which is why it’s often better to have them performed by a professional developer.
WP Tech Support offer WordPress site maintenance plans, including automated core and plugin updates and daily backups to keep your site stable and secure. Our great value plans are simple to sign up for on single or multiple sites and if you’re not 100% happy with our service then we’ll refund your payment. Sign up today to keep your WordPress site in optimum health.