So, you started your business blog or website. Congrats! If you’re anything like 455 million other bloggers, you’re using WordPress as a hosting platform. WordPress is extremely popular among bloggers and business owners alike for its ease of use, compatibility, and scalability. But with the sheer number of blogs out there, it’s essential to stand out from the crowd. The way to do that is on the internet is with strong, carefully calculated writing, revisions, and research. But most importantly? Visitors look for reliability and a trustworthy presence. So, WordPress maintenance is a must for anyone with a site on the platform.

What Is WordPress Maintenance?
WordPress maintenance is the act of taking care of your website. It sounds simple, but many different elements go into maintenance and site upkeep.

1. Updating Plug-Ins, Themes, And Other Elements Of Your Site
WordPress is easy to use, but many elements do not update themselves. Things like custom plugins, themes, and WordPress core need weekly attention. Outdated web elements not only hinder user experience but can impact Google rankings, as well.

2. Proofreading and UX-scanning
The best writers use proofreaders. It doesn’t make them less of a writer; instead, it puts a new set of eyes on their writing. Proofreading picks out errors in writing that can be off putting to a reader. It also helps maintain the ease of reading for people coming to your website. The more user-friendly a website is, the more likely you will keep regular visitors coming back to your site.

3. SEO Auditing
As well as regular visitors, you’ll want to bring in new visitors — and to do that, you’ll need to do regular Search Engine Optimization (SEO) audits. SEO analyzes how well your website ranks in popular search engines like Google and Yahoo. SEO blogging involves strategic, ongoing planning and regular competitor research. WordPress, thankfully, offers plugins that can help bloggers maintain basic SEO.

4. Security Updates
An essential security update that any blog owner can do is regularly updating their password. However, other security maintenance tasks will also improve SEO and user trust. These include:

• Auditing site plugins for security issues
• Auditing your website for security issues
• Keeping up to date with potential phishing and malware threats

5. Checking For Broken Links & 404 Errors
It’s common practice not only to link internal sites for SEO purposes but link to external sites, as well. Eventually, most links change or are deleted. When pages or whole websites are broken, they may lead to 404 errors, which means that the browser was able to communicate with the site but could not load the data on that site. Bloggers must be aware of broken links and 404 pages on their website and external websites to ensure their site optimization isn’t impacted.

6. Optimize Your Site’s Database
A WordPress database is the information stored on your site’s 11 main core tables. Your database stores comments, post data, tag data, and more. Although maintaining individual elements of the WordPress core is usually pretty easy, there are so many different parts to your database that optimization can sometimes be one of the biggest hurdles. Some easy ways to optimize site databases include:

• Cleaning up spam comments
• Revising old posts
• Refreshing links
• Removing unnecessary post tags

Why Do You Need To Maintain Your WordPress Site?
There aren’t just thousands of competitors online — there are millions. Most of them do not maintain their websites, which automatically puts them at a disadvantage. Finding a way to maintain your website gives you an advantage over your competitors. Maintenance takes work. It doesn’t have to be complicated, and it can make a huge difference.
Are you feeling overwhelmed with maintenance tasks? Schedule an appointment with one of our WordPress maintenance experts today!