Your WordPress Maintenance Checklist

GK Web Agency has been handling WordPress maintenance for hundreds of clients for years now. Below is a list of what we believe to be the most reasonable checklist for monthly WordPress updates and maintenance.

GK Web Agency has been handling WordPress maintenance for hundreds of clients for years now. Below is a list of what we believe to be the most reasonable checklist for monthly WordPress updates and maintenance.

1. Create Website Backups
2. Website Speed Audit
3. Check for Broken Links
4. Images Optimisation
5. Review Search Console
6. Review Google Analytics
7. Update WordPress
8. Review Title & Meta Description tags
9. Delete Spam Comments
10. Security Check

1. Create Website Backups

The first and most important aspect of any WordPress maintenance checklist is ensuring you have a consistent backup schedule. This is especially important to do before you update WordPress or any plugins on your website.

2. Website Speed Audit

Checking your website speed score monthly is an easy way to see if anything drastic has happened to your site performance. Logging your speed scores each month allows you to narrow down changes that had a negative effect on your site speed or your overall performance score.

3. Check for Broken Links

Having used a number of online tools, I’ve never found anything better than Screaming Frog SEO Spider for crawling sites for broken links. The infographic recommends adding a plugin to do this, but that can degrade your performance and get you in a bit of trouble with your host.

4. Images Optimization

Uncompressed images can severely impact the performance of your site.

5. Review Search Console

Reviewing your Google Search Console monthly is a guaranteed way to stay on top of your website’s health. Search console provides useful information about broken links, site errors and excluded URLs – things that could be detrimental to your search rankings will usually be shown here first.

6. Review Google Analytics

It’s always suprising to our clients how few of their pages are actually indexed by search engines or even read by visitors. We especially appreciate User Flow, the report that shows how people are navigating through your site.

7. Update WordPress

Following our 1st checklist item is super important to do before tackling this part of the monthly website maintenance in case anything goes wrong. It’s also important to feel confident in your ability to restore your site from a backup. Being capable of restoring an older version of your website is important before doing a WordPress update. If that’s outside of your comfort zone, you might want to leave these updates to a developer or digital agency.

8. Review Title & Meta Description tags

Yoast SEO A great way to optimize your site for search engines is to install and configure the plugins. Titles will help your page get indexed properly for the content its revealing and meta descriptions will entice search engine users to click through on your listing result.

9. Delete Spam Comments

If you run a website that has commenting functionality its essential to check for comment spam that links to bad websites. This kind of spam can slowly bring down your domain authority.

10. Security Check

At this point, you have updated your site and plugins and deleted spam comments and checked your website health via Google Search Console. However, ensuring no security issues are present on your site is still really important. You can use a security plugin and perform a quick check of the logs/alerts to ensure everything looks good.

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