WordPress websites do require maintenance. And if you have forgotten about that, then it’s time you should have a look at this maintenance checklist. In this article, we are going to look at 8 important website maintenance tasks you should perform to keep running your website smoothly. You can do these tasks by yourself or you can use a plugin to do the job for you. Either way, this should be easy and fun.
Let’s dive in.
1. Back up
Back up is the first maintenance task. You should back up your WordPress website as frequently as possible. Always make sure that you have a recent copy of your website. You will appreciate this simple action so much when everything goes wrong with your website and it’s backup copy that saves you from extinction! Such times do come and it is better to be ready for them with a backup plan!
There are also other times when a backup can help. These include:
- When your site becomes messed up
- When your site is broken and you can’t repair it
- Your site is infected
- Your website has disappeared
In each of these cases, restoring the backup copy of your website will do the trick.
Make sure you have off-site backups
Some hosts provide backups on their own servers. While this may seem to do the work, remember it is a bad idea to keep the backup on the same servers where your website is hosted. Off-site backups do exist for a reason – they are effective. So make sure you store your backup at a remote location – either a cloud storage service like Google Drive, Amazon S3, Dropbox or you have a local copy saved in your hard disk.
Use WordPress Backup Plugins
Plugins make the backup task so easy. You don’t have to worry about uploading and downloading via FTP and restoring is often a one-click operation. There are many effective WordPress backup plugins. Here is our list of 12 Best Backup Plugins for WordPress to help you find the best backup plugin for you.
Premium plugins do offer value for money. However, you can try free premium plugins as well. UpdraftPlus is one of the most recommended backup plugins in our list. The Premium version offers incremental backups, multiple storage locations, automatic backup before updates, migrator, WP-CLI integration, encrypted backups and much more.
In case, you don’t want to shell out money for a premium backup plugin as yet, you can still try the free version of UpdraftPlus. It offers you to select one storage location for your backups for free.
The free version allows you to take a backup with a one-click operation. The backup is automatically uploaded to the storage location you select in settings. You can add more storage locations using an add-on. There is an option for incremental backups as well. With incremental backups, you back up changed files only. This saves precious storage space and the backup process becomes a lot faster even if you have a very large website. You should make sure that your website backup includes a backup of plugins, themes, database and updates as well.
Keep regular backups of your website. This will save you from catastrophe if it happens to you. Better safe than sorry!
