4 Vital Monthly WordPress Maintenance Tasks

Hello Friends, today we will learn about 4 Vital Monthly WordPress Maintenance tasks which we need to do regularly. But first, we need to understand why WordPress maintenance is important. We think that once our  WordPress website is completed and live, our work is over, but that’s not true.

If we neglect to maintain the WordPress site, then you will see the following results:

• Security vulnerabilities
• Page loading time will increase
• Bad user experience
• Loose search engine ranking

Let’s see what the WordPress maintenance services are, so we keep a WordPress site running smoothly:

• WordPress Site Backup
• WordPress Updates
• Theme & Plugin Updates
• WordPress Security

We can extend WordPress maintenance in some other areas, such as adding new content, updating existing content, comments moderation, spam cleanup, and many more…

Let’s explore all the above points one by one

WordPress Site Backup

Backups are essential to successful WordPress websites and should not be ignored. WordPress doesn’t have any built-in feature to take a backup from the backend. Both WordPress files and the database are necessary for the backups so that we can restore them.

There are two ways to take a backup of your website: Either from a plugin or manually. The BackWPup plugin is the best option for taking a backup. Using this plugin, you can schedule automatic backups and store backups in multiple places such as Dropbox, Amazon S3, and many more, see screenshot below…

Secondly, we can take a backup manually. In this method, you can take a backup from the Web hosting cPanel. To take a backup of WordPress files, go to the { File Manager >> Public_html >> your website files }, compress all files, and download them to your local system. You can leave the file on the server as well. For the Database, go to { phpmyadmin >> your Database >> Export } and download it on your local system. Please export at least 2-3 times to make sure that the full database is downloaded, some time due to internet issues full Database is not downloaded.

Now you are ready to go to the second step: WordPress Update.

WordPress Updation

After taking WordPress files & Database backup, you will be ready to update WordPress latest version. While updating WordPress version, no need to do anything; WordPress automatically converts your website into Under Maintenance mode, so please be patient while upgrading. WordPress releases major core updates twice a year and minor updates periodically to address security vulnerabilities. Please make sure to delete the readme.txt & License.txt files; otherwise, your website hacking chances will increase because these files indicate your website’s WordPress version.

Plugins & Theme Updation

Once the WordPress version update process is successful, start updating the plugins. Please make sure that you update plugins one by one and in meanwhile keep examining the website. If there is an inactive plugin or if there are any plugins that have no use on the website that you can delete them. If you skip updates and forget to delete unwanted plugins, then your website becomes vulnerable. That’s why it’s important to keep WordPress, themes, and plugins up-to-date and running the latest version.

WordPress Security

Security for your WordPress site is the most critical maintenance service. Especially for WordPress, Security is the area that you should never ignore. So what we do is install a security plugin which secures your website from Malware, prevents hacking, and much more…

Let’s explore some steps that help us to secure our WordPress website:

• WordPress core, plugins & themes updated to the latest version.
• Delete unused plugins & themes.
• Try to use a strong password for the website administrator.
• Try not to use the ‘admin‘ username for the administrator.
• Your website should be hosted by a reputable service provider like GoDaddy, Hostmonster, Bluehost, etc…
• While installing WordPress, try to change the Database tables prefix, like DBTBL02_ or anything that you
  like instead of the default prefix wp_
• Check the File manager in your website hosting and make sure that there are no infected files. If you find any, please delete them as soon as possible.
• Enable your website’s Security Headers

Using WordPress functions, we can easily enable automatic updates of WordPress. Let’s see the function…

define( 'WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', true );

WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE can be defined with one of three values, each producing a different behavior:

• Value of true – Development, minor, and major updates are all enabled
• Value of false – Development, minor, and major updates are all disabled
• Value of ‘minor’ – Minor updates are enabled, development and major updates are disabled

If you follow above instructions, your website will never get infected from malwares and stay away from vulnerabilities.