The Ultimate WordPress Maintenance Checklist for Power Users

The Daily Tasks

Visit your website. Visit your own website as if you were a visitor – not the owner – and quickly scan through it. Doing this will help you see your site the way your visitors do and make it easier to spot any design or functionality errors.

Delete all spam comments. Go through your comments and delete all the spam. Even if you’re using a plugin, you might have to go in and permanently delete them manually from your site so they don’t take up space in your database.

Reply to legit comments. Once the spam is all filtered out, approve and respond to the legitimate comments that you’ve received.

Backup your WordPress database. Taking daily backups of your WordPress database is important. We recommend using the BackUpWordPress plugin. Pro tip: You can configure the plugin to take automatic, regular backups!

Monitor site uptime.  Check your site’s uptime stats using Jetpack’s Monitor. Pro tip: You can set the plugin to shoot you an email every time your site experiences downtime.

The Weekly Tasks

Update your theme. Check to see if your active theme has an available update and run the update if it does.

Update your plugins. Check to see if the plugins you have activated have available updates and run the updates if they do.

Test out your contact forms/subscription forms/comments. Send yourself an email through your contact forms, subscribe to your blog, and comment on a post to make sure everything works smoothly.

Test out your menus/navigation. Visit your website’s front-end once again and make sure the menus and sub-menus work properly.

Backup your site’s core files. You should take weekly backups of your WordPress site’s core. We recommend using the BackUpWordPress plugin. Pro tip: You can configure the plugin to take automatic, regular backups!

Run a malware scan. Scan your site for infected files and security issues. Your web host might already be doing this but it never hurts to double check. We recommend using the Wordfence Security plugin.

Download your backed up files. To be on the safe side, download a copy of your site’s files and database and save it to your local drive/cloud storage. So, even if your server crashes, you’ll still be able to restore your website.

The Monthly Tasks

Monitor page load times. Use tools like Pingdom, GTmetrix, and Load Impact to monitor how fast your site loads. All three tools provide helpful insight into how you can improve your loading times.

Delete post revisions. By default, WordPress auto-saves your posts. But once the post is published, it’s unlikely that you’ll need to revert back to an old version. Permanently delete all post revisions to clear up your database and improve site performance.

Check for broken links. Go through your site and remove/update any broken links. We recommend using the Broken Link Checker plugin that does this automatically.

Deactivate and delete unused themes. Outdated themes can pose security risks. It’s important to deactivate and delete the themes you aren’t using.

Deactivate and delete unused plugins. Outdated plugins can also cause security vulnerabilities in your WordPress website. This is why it’s important that you deactivate and delete all of the plugins you don’t use.

Check for WordPress core updates. New and improved versions of the core WordPress software are released regularly to fix security issues and bugs, add new features, and improve performance.

Make sure your feed is working. Use the W3C Feed Validation Service to make sure your site’s feed is working properly.

Check Google Analytics. Logging into your Google Analytics account to monitor metrics like traffic acquisition, bounce rates, conversions, exit pages, etc. will give you a better understanding of your audience.

Clear your trash. Permanently clearing out your trash will help declutter your database and improve site performance.

Clean out your Media Library. Media files take up a lot of storage space. Go through your Media Library and permanently delete any files that aren’t being used.

Other Important Maintenance Tasks

Review landing page/About Us page. Make sure the information published on your most viewed pages is up to date.

Test device and browser compatibility. We recommend using the Responsive Website Design Tester tool to make sure your website looks good on devices of all sizes. And for browser compatibility, try PowerMapper.

Validate your website. Doing this ensures that your site’s pages are interpreted the same way by search engines and your visitors. We recommend using W3C’s Markup and CSS Validation Services.

Check web hosting stats. Log in to your web hosting account and check on your bandwidth usage, disk space, uptime, etc. If you see that you’re low on these metrics, consider upgrading your hosting plan.

Maintaining your blog is pretty easy. You just have to make sure you do it regularly. Bookmark this checklist and refer back to it to make sure you’ve crossed off all the boxes.

Is there something you’d like to add to the WordPress maintenance checklist? Let us know by commenting below!