Basic WordPress Website Maintenance Tasks You Should Do

When maintaining your WordPress website yourself (instead of your designer or techie doing it), here’s what you should do.

1. Update WordPress software.

Update your website at least monthly, best to do it weekly alongside other routine weekly tasks. While you’re there, also run updates on your plug-ins and themes.

2. Test functionality. 

Test all the functional/interactive elements of your website, including:

• your email list sign-up process, if you have one 
• your main call-to-action form and process
• view a blog post and post a comment on it
• your general contact form if you have one
• test any social links or connections
• test any online registration software or sales functionality
• test any calendar booking software
• test it all 😉

3. Check your website on your laptop and phone.

Click through the most visited pages of your website on your laptop or desktop. You don’t have to click through all blogs, just a few to know that blog pages are working ok.

Jump on your mobile phone and on your tablet as well to make sure things look and work well.

4. Run a speed test. 

When sites run slow, people hit the road – you lose visitors. And there are many things that can affect your site’s speed.

Use the free tool at Pingdom.com to track speed and uptime.

There are things you can’t control like your host company technology or the visitor’s internet access speed like a mobile phone user using plane wifi (usually slow).

And, there are things you can control, like your file sizes and your hosting plan (higher plans are usually faster) at your host company.

But for most DIYing coaches, who are not techies, you’d best leave the speed fixing up to the professionals.

5. Back it up.

Check your hosting company’s services when it comes to backing up your website. Most will have some sort of way to recover files of your website.

I recommend having a process to back things away from the host to eliminate the failure from:

• you forgetting to pay hosting and your account closes
• your host company fails on their end 
• your website or hosting account gets hacked and bad stuff happens

6. Check your stats to make sure all is working.

You should check your website statistics to make sure things are working as normal.

Just compare this month’s numbers to last month. If anything looks strangely off, there could be some bugs or tech hiccups floating around.

Obviously, you should check your stats when running any ad/marketing efforts to gauge what’s working or not.