Basics of setting up a WordPress website

Step 3 – Basic Website Maintenance

These steps will walk you through the minimum maintenance you should action to keep your site safe, SEO’d and running smoothly. Although plugins can be automated, it’s still a good idea to check them, and check your site too.

Daily

  • Ensure you’ve scheduled automatic daily backups with a relevant plugin.
  • Publish a blog post – top marks if you do this every day.

Weekly

  • Site visibility check – if you haven’t clicked through to your site lately, just have a look and make sure it’s running smoothly – once a week.
  • Approve/delete any comments
  • Publish a blog post – Great work if you can achieve this weekly.

Monthly

  • Check your site’s performance via Pingdom or Google Page Speed Insights, along with your caching/performance plugin. A loading time of 3-5 seconds is your aim.
    See post – How to speed up your WordPress site
  • Publish blog post – strive to post on a monthly basis as the minimum. It’ll keep your site fresh and will please Google’s search bots who love to see new content. Yes, it can be hard, but find a routine as it really does help your site.
  • SEO review and tweaks
  • Log out as admin and use the site as a regular visitor to check for broken links and missing images. Pages are the core of your selling site, so are more important to check than your (blog) posts.
  • Plugin & Theme Check – are you using them? Plugins and themes can weigh down your website so if you have any deactivated, or if you know you’re not going to use them; delete them. However, be sure because you don’t want to delete an important plugin that you simply don’t recognise.

Annually

  • Review your customer’s journey.
  • Give your site design a review and clean up – web designs can look dated after a while so think about new images photos, tweak your colours. Does your theme need a revamp? A new theme maybe?
  • Review your core content – does the core information still reflect the direction of your business? Can you see any positive edits you can make to your messages?