For a secure, long-lasting website, proper website maintenance is needed. It enables the identification of problems early on, resolves them, and ensures that the website remains functional and beneficial. To maintain stability and well-functioning, all WordPress sites need some degree of maintenance.
WordPress is still improving. The core team is constantly adding new functionality, fixing bugs, and patching newly found security vulnerabilities, among other things. The same can be said for all of the plugins used, as well as the internet in general.
The website is constantly evolving as well. It may be introducing new features, changing the design, or publishing new content. This may sound difficult, but it does not have to be. All of these improvements usually go off without a problem. However, it is important to put in some maintenance work to prevent the occasional cases where something goes wrong and to keep on top of changes at the site.
WordPress Website Maintenance Checklist
Some of the steps that must be taken to maintain a website built in any technology should work as a checklist for any website owner.
Back up Your Site
To protect site records, must have a recent backup. So, if the WordPress host is not already backing up an account, you will have to do it yourself. Daily backups are a great frequency for most pages.
Apply Updates (Core, Plugins, and Theme).
If there are any updates available, you can install them as soon as possible. You can test updates on a staging site before adding them to your live website if you are concerned about compatibility issues. You can also place your site in maintenance mode when making updates.
Check Google Search Console
Google Search Console will notify you if there are any problems with your site’s SEO or mobile optimization. As a result, it is important to check in regularly to see if Google has flagged any problems with the site.
Run Performance Tests
The speed at which the site loads has a significant impact on user experience and conversion rates, as well as a minor positive impact on SEO.Most likely optimized the site for speed when it was built. However, this does not guarantee that site will remain optimized, so you should also evaluate its output regularly to catch any potential issues.
Analyze Your Site’s Traffic
You should be using a web analytics tool like Google Analytics to figure out what is going on with the site. If SEO is a key component of strategy, you can set up keyword tracking to track the site’s Google rankings and check in once a month.
Run a Security Scan
Because of its popularity, malicious actors find WordPress to be an attractive choice. Running daily security scans to spot possible problems is a safe way to ensure the site does not become a target.
Check for Broken Links or 404 Errors
Broken links or 404 errors are bad for your site’s user experience because they prevent users from finding what they are looking for.
Although broken links and 404 errors are different, they are often associated as a broken link results in a 404 error. If you are not familiar with a 404 error, it is the message that appears on your website when a visitor attempts to access a URL that does not exist.
Verify Your Site’s Backups
A backup is only useful if it works. Although you should back up the site every month, you should also check that the backups are still working regularly.
How does headless WordPress maintenance differ from traditional maintenance?
A headless WordPress makes content management much easier. Nonetheless, a headless architecture that centralizes all of the content and content maintenance into a single platform streamlines these activities.
The agile approach of headless WordPress maintenance
The stakeholders in your company become democratically in control of the content. Headless WordPress encourages a more flexible way of operating, content owners from around the organization will focus on content maintenance at the same time. Traditional CMS workflows, in which all changes will land on marketing or IT to update and retain content from all parts of the company, create internal bottlenecks.
Considering the Content as a service
If you use Content as a Service, you can effectively eradicate all technology-related CMS maintenance. Your provider is responsible for security upgrades, backups, and server maintenance. The only thing left is to keep the material and properties contained inside the headless WordPress up to date.
Content repository
When it comes to reducing the CMS maintenance burden, a headless CMS has a lot of advantages. In short, Jamstack technology’s decoupled approach, in which headless WordPress is used only as a content repository or back-end, will remove virtually all traditional maintenance while also improving content management.
Budget-friendly maintenance
Choosing a content management system (CMS) that helps you to concentrate on your content and consumers while eliminating the need for expensive maintenance. Like, prefer headless WordPress as it is open source and does not cost you anything so you can purchase a good theme and use CDNs like Netlify and Vercel to run a smooth and well-performing organization will website.