WordPress is the number one content management system in the world because of its ease of use. Regardless of your content management system, every website requires daily, weekly and monthly maintenance to remain fast and efficient.
Our WordPress maintenance checklist covers a list of essential things you should do religiously each month to ensure that your website runs smoothly across multiple devices. While we mention this as a monthly list, that’s the maximum amount of time you should go between checking off this list. These will provide better results if they can be performed weekly or even daily for some items.
1. Perform a website speed audit to ensure it’s loading quickly.
Page speed can affect SEO and user experience. GTMetrix, WP Checkup, and Google’s Page Insights are great tools that pinpoint where your slowness could be coming from. This could be large images, a heavy homepage with lots of elements, or even a slow hosting provider.
2. Monitor your website security daily.
We’ll call this one out daily because security is such a big concern. If you have security plugins in place, run a daily test. These may be automated to look for intrusions, file changes, and malware.
3. Review Google Analytics.
The best way to know how well your site is doing and what’s working is by reviewing your Analytics data. Think of this as you would ratings data and review weekly as a minimum.
4. Clear your trash.
When you delete something in WordPress, it first lands in the trash so you can retrieve it if you wish. This can build up over time. Old pages, posts, expired events and contests, obituaries, team schedules, banner ads campaigns that have ended… anything that is sitting in the trash is simply taking up space and can cause your site to get slower over time. It also takes additional resources to backup each day, so try to keep those cleared out as much as possible.
5. Clean your media files.
One of the main reasons you may run out of space on your hosting provider is because you have media that is no longer being used. Perhaps you uploaded an image but decided to go with a different one. These files add up over time and your server must do additional work to keep them backed up each day.
6. Ensure images are optimized.
If you have multiple authors on your site, randomly do a check of your post images to ensure they are being optimized. Optimized images load faster and that helps with SEO and user experience. If they are not, then ensure your authors know the value of the optimization process.
7. Check your navigation menus.
Poor navigation is one of the frustrating spots for users. Check everything to ensure things are easy to find and hassle-free. Is anything missing? Be sure to check on desktop and mobile.
8. Check for broken links and missing pages.
These can dramatically reduce your search engine ranking. Do a search for “broken link checker” and enter your site for analysis.
9. Review your forms.
Is your newsletter still easy to sign up for? Are contests easy to enter? Do the “contact us” and “advertise with us” forms work properly? Are those forms still going to the appropriate e-mails? If not, you could be missing opportunities.
10. Review the “Advertise with Us” page.
Keeping this current and relevant is crucial because you don’t want to miss an advertising opportunity. How can it be better?
11. Check and delete spam comments.
Ensure that spammers have not gotten through to comment on your website. Deleting all spam comments helps to keep your database clean and fast.
12. Reply to comments.
If you have comments enabled, reply to them when necessary to improve user engagement.
13. Change your passwords.
One of the most effective ways to prevent a malicious attack is to update your passwords often. And ensure they are strong passwords. In our 9 years of doing this, we’ve only had one intrusion and it was because of a weak password.
14. Remove inactive website admins.
If someone has left the radio station, then ensure they are removed from the website admin. In the deletion process, it will ask if you want their posts to be attributed to a different author.
15. Review your site on multiple devices
Ensure things are still working the way someone would expect them to. If your site is experiencing an issue on a device you don’t use very often, it may take a long time to resolve and that could result in lost visitors.
Conclusion:
While this list of for WordPress websites, the same can be true regardless of your content management system. Every website needs continuous maintenance to work properly.
Need help with your radio station website? Reach out to us.
