By Upma Kumari  November 16, 2023

Just like servicing your car from time to time increases its efficiency, in a similar manner, consistently updating and maintaining the WordPress site ensures that the site is functioning to its fullest potential. And that involves a whole series of tasks, such as keeping up with the updated plugins or widgets, fixing any security loopholes, deleting unnecessary files, and setting up the site’s configuration.

The majority of WP sites require minimal upkeep if done on a regular basis; however, going the other way can consume a lot of your efforts and time. In this blog, we have come up with the best 8 tips to make WordPress maintenance smoother and easier for developers like you.

So, without further ado, let’s dive into them.

The Best WordPress Maintenance Tips

Take consistent backups

Taking full backups of your WordPress website regularly might seem like a bigger task than the WordPress development itself, but trust us, it is the most crucial aspect of WP maintenance. It saves you from the constant worry that if anything goes wrong with your website, like if it gets crashed or hacked, In either case, you can restore the previous version of it and start from there. This way, you won’t need to spend hours and hours of time troubleshooting or redesigning your site from scratch.

But how would you do it? Well, you can take the full backup either by following one of the three ways:

• You can do it manually. Simply copy and paste the database files to a different location.
• The second is by using a hosting service that automatically takes the backup at the time specified by you.
• The third is by using a WordPress backup plugin.

Install your site locally

Installing your WP site locally saves you from the continuous travel back and forth from your local machine and the server after every edit. Even if there is a minor edit, you need to navigate to the respective file in the FTP client, waiting for it to upload fully and hoping not to encounter any errors. And the work does not end here. Once the file or folder is successfully uploaded, you need to refresh the page, which again could take a fraction of seconds.

When counting all these minutes and seconds taken during the entire process on a bigger picture (which means a complex WP site), you could save a lot of hours. Therefore, it is wise to install your site locally on the system; it will speed up the entire maintenance process.

Update plugins and themes

One of the primary reasons why a lot of WP sites encounter errors or security-related issues is because they use outdated plugins and themes on their websites. The more time you spend using them, the more your site is exposed to such threats. Moreover, using them over a long period of time reduces your site’s efficiency. This is because the updated plugins or components have much more functionality than their prior versions.

Besides, updating them on a daily basis takes merely a few seconds. So, why not update them today and make your WP maintenance work smoother for yourself?

Remove unwanted files

At times, the websites bloated with files, software, or code that were no longer needed. They are only consuming the additional space and piling on the maintenance work. If your site is the same, it’s time to clean up some mess and buy extra space for your important files.

Check the list of your active plugins and see what you are using and what you are not. Once found, delete the unnecessary ones. Moreover, in addition to these files, you might even find some unwanted media files in the WP-content folder, so check them too. To do it more efficiently, we would recommend that you keep checking on them every one or two months.

Add comments during coding

There was this funny quote about programmers: the one who wrote the code was only understood by the coder, God, and their co-workers. After some time, it was only God, and the coder knew it, and now it is only known by God; even the coder can’t recognize it.

This is why the whole concept of commenting came into existence. Adding comments during coding whenever a not-so-obvious block, class, or function is added is a healthy programming practice. Not following that will add up the time for developers or yourself (in case you are the coder) to make the required edits and fix the bugs.

To make your WP maintenance work easier, try to implement the practice of adding comments describing every single parameter used in not-so-easy to understand code.

Optimize your website’s speed

According to a search engine journal, a web page should not take more than three seconds to load. With the everyday addition of media files, coding, plugins, or theme modifications, your website’s speed can slow down in between. And for this reason, your site can get penalized by search engines. Therefore, it is crucial to optimize your website on a consistent basis and make your overall WP maintenance work smoother.

To do that, start by optimizing the images before uploading them to the site; this could drastically reduce their size. Then, try to use as few third-party elements as possible, which include the waiting response time from the server, resulting in more page loading time. Next, clear the browser cache, which will reduce the loading time for visitors. For the overall optimization of your website’s speed, we would recommend that you test the speed of every single webpage.

Optimize your WP database

The WordPress site stores every single piece of data in the form of a database. From every minute change to discarded posts or drafts, all get stored in the database table. If your site is in its initial phase or smaller in size, you won’t have any trouble maintaining it. However, as the site gets bigger, the database along with it grows bigger, thus piling up an abundance of backlogs.

Thus, it is crucial to clean up the unwanted database on a regular basis so that you will spend less time maintaining the site in the future.

Fix broken links

Checking and fixing broken links is another crucial aspect of your WP maintenance. For instance, if a visitor clicks on a broken link and leads nowhere, they can assume that the site is outdated or does not carry any reliability. It could further harm your site’s ranking, according to SEO’s point of view. Search engines can penalize your site for wasting user’s time through broken links.