6 WordPress maintenance tasks you should be doing regularly

If you are a small to a mid-size business owner with a WordPress website and process personal information or transactional data, you should not wait to perform regular maintenance. Be proactive and plan maintenance at regular intervals. After all, your website presence is an essential piece of digital marketing you have, and reacting to data loss can be a costly strategy.

Here are six key points about the maintenance tasks that should be carried out regularly if your website is built on WordPress:

• WordPress Updates - This web service makes regular updates to core files, plugins, and themes. These either add new functionality and options or are essential security fixes. Updates should be carried out regularly to protect your website, ideally every week. Before any update process is run, be sure to check that a recent backup has been taken!
• Have a clear backup strategy. This strategy helps to protect the important asset that is your website. Have an external backup process in place and do not rely on the website hosting company.
• Test the functionality of your website every week. Test that any forms are correctly sending emails and being received. If you have an E-Commerce website, make a test purchase and ensure that it shows up correctly in the back-end and any transactional emails being sent out. Testing functionality is vital, especially before sales campaigns or other frequent transaction opportunities.
• Uptime Monitoring - One sign of an inferior web host is lots of web outages. If you have experienced many of these, it’s time to seek a new web host. There are a variety of tools and information to monitor uptime. At the very least, uptime should be monitored automatically at least every 15 minutes, but preferably every 5 minutes. A good web hosting service will notify you if there is a web outage.
• Regular security scans help to mitigate a possible attack. While no website is 100% secure from any attacks, you can ensure your website is as difficult as possible to attack, leaving any malicious attackers to target less secure websites instead.
• Speed Optimization – This is important if you frequently update and add content to your website. It is worth performing a speed test once a week to ensure that the website performs at its best.

Remember, regular maintenance on your website is a proactive strategy you cannot afford to let slide. If this seems overwhelming to you or is a function you are not comfortable doing, we can help.  We offer a variety of Care Plans that take the burden off your shoulders so that you can run the business for success. Give us a call or click here to get more information and select an option right for you.