10 Crucial WordPress Maintenance Tasks For SEO and Security.

Published by Gurjit on August 17, 2023
Categories: BLOG WORDPRESS

Do you know WordPress maintenance is a crucial factor to gain traffic for your blog? It is the second important step after starting a blog.

You may not receive potential benefits or face serious losses if you are unaware of how to perform WordPress Maintenance.

In this article, you will learn how to promote your blog by doing a WordPress Maintenance task.

Table of Contents

Why is WordPress Maintenance Tasks Important.

WordPress maintenance can benefit our blog by ensuring a smooth run and improving SEO, this results in an increase in traffic to our blog. SEO and the smooth running of the blog are closely related. Moreover, it contributes to enhancing security and user experience.
To ensure smooth run of the WordPress blog, we need to perform tasks like security checks, backups, and deleting unnecessary material.

It is a normal continuous process. Next, we will learn step by step.

WordPress Backup and Restoration

Backup should be at the top of the priority list of WordPress maintenance tasks.
I won’t say that you need to take backup daily or weekly. The frequency of backups depends on certain factors. It is good to take backup every time you write a new post or updated an old post. It may be daily, weekly, or monthly.

It’s beneficial to have multiple copies of the backup in different locations.

Before we move forward, we need to understand a few basic things.

A WordPress blog consists of files and a database.
i ) Files: The WordPress theme and plugin files.
ii) Database: posts, comments, metadata

A proper backup must include both WordPress files and the database backup. The backup of the database is more important.
If anything goes wrong, we can recover the blog by installing WordPress and plugins again, which may be a little time-consuming but not impossible. But in case of database loss, it is very harmful because writing content is difficult and even impossible.

Different ways to back up a WordPress blog.

Manually backup using FTP and phpMyAdmin

We use phpMyAdmin to download database files in this method. To save WordPress files and images on our local storage, we use FTP.

You can find phpAdmin in cPanel and download your database. for complete steps visit the tutorial WordPress Backup.

Hosting backups

There is also an option within CPanel to back up. But you should not rely upon hosting backups. As you don’t have enough control over them, these may fail to restore your blog.

WordPress Backup Plugin for backup

As it is a simple and easy method, this method is suitable for beginners.

There are several plugins for WordPress backups, some of them are UpdraftPlus, Duplicator, BackWPup, BlogVault, and BackupBuddy. The process of WordPress backups is automated by these plugins.

These plugins store backups to Google Drive or Dropbox. All you have to do is check the backup manually and should learn how to restore the backup when necessary.

Check the backups frequently because sometimes the plugin may not backup, so that in such cases you can take the necessary measures.

The Security of a WordPress Blog as WordPress Maintenance Task

Security is the most important factor in WordPress maintenance. We can save our data by backups. However, security is required to prevent some other non-desirable consequences. Before an attack takes place on our WordPress blog, we should be aware that it could slow down our WordPress blog, spoil the user experience, and decrease our search rankings.

To prevent any mishaps, we need to take proactive measures.

The protection of passwords.

When security is at stake, there are never enough options available. To gain access, hackers use a list of commonly used usernames and passwords and apply the hit-and-trial method to crack passwords. It is called a brute-force attack.

Apart from that They also use scripts that try thousands of combinations to crack the password.

Avoid the use of easy passwords, which can be found in lists of common usernames and passwords that have been leaked on the web. In addition to preventing all these things, change your password frequently and use a strong, unique, long password with a special character combination that can prevent access to your blog by brute force attacks. Remove accounts that are not in use.

Use of a security plugin.

These plugins scan your WordPress and add some additional day-to-day protection. Set frequency of scan at least once a month. There are a few security plugins below you can use.

WordFence Security
All In One WP Security & Firewall

you can also use the free service Sucuri Sitecheck to check your WordPress blog

lock-down your WordPress admin login.

It is also a good measure to change your login so that it would not be accessible to malicious attackers and hackers.
Hiding the login URL of your WordPress site is very helpful to protect from brute force attacks, hacks, and random attacks. It will be hard for Hackers and malicious attackers access your login if it is changed.

The easiest way to change the location of the WP login is to use The WPS Hide Login plugin. It allows you to change the location of login WordPress without rewriting any files. It intercepts the login request and redirected to the location of your choice.
Its additional advantages are that it is very light, It does not rewrite any rule or alter any file. It is also free.
It’s also compatible with other plugins, as Limit Login Attempts, BuddyPress, User Switching plugins, and bbPress.

Updating WordPress core, theme, and plugins

Another important WordPress maintenance task is to update the WordPress core, theme, and plugins.

New functions added by developers can be utilized by updating these elements.
New versions are important as they remove errors and faults detected in older versions and as a result more stable and secure. This is ultimately beneficial for both user experience and website SEO.

Over time, older versions become outdated and can be compromised by hackers and malware.
So to prevent such threats, we should update new versions.

Let us not forget that we should use a stable version if we are not experts.
Updating WordPress is a simple process. An update icon will appear on top of the dashboard at the left side of the comments icon when there are new releases for WordPress. As shown in the image below.

Click it now.
You will see the dashboard will show the details of all updates, just click on them and update.

One thing you should keep in mind is to back up your WordPress blog whenever you update anything. If a problem occurs, a recent backup can be used to restore it.

Removal of Broken links as WordPress Maintenance.

Broken link removal is also an important part of WordPress maintenance.

Broken links are links that point to pages that are either not present or have been moved.
Broken links can be either external or internal. As the blog grows, the chance of broken links increases.

Broken links can be caused by multiple factors. It is possible that a target page to be deleted, a page to be changed or moved, or the link to point to the wrong page. The URL is either incorrect or misspelled.

Broken links have negative consequences.

Poor user experience:

A 404 error is displayed when a visitor clicks on a broken link. The 404 error page irritates the visitor and creates a bad user experience. This creates a negative impression in the visitor’s mind, which will prevent them from returning to your website. indirectly It also down your blog SEO.

Negative effect on SEO:
Search engines navigate your website through internal links. Broken links prevent search engines to navigate your WordPress blog. it will hurt your blog’s SEO.

How to identify and remove broken links.

As a result of the broken links, you can lose your blog traffic. By checking for broken links, you can easily avoid this situation.

The following methods can help you identify broken internal links on your website.

Manually checking broken links is an option, but it’s a tedious task for a large blog or may be impossible. This method requires you to click all the links on your blog.

A Broken Link Checker plugin is also available. You should use the plugin at regular intervals.

If you don’t want to use the plugin, you can use automated tools like:

Google Search Console and Google Analytics reveal links that caused 404 errors on a WordPress blog.

Screaming Frog is also an online tool to find broken links. Download it from the website and install it. Just enter the website URL and start. It will produce a list of links.

Fix Internal Broken Links

Remove the link. If the page has been deleted, delete the link to it too.
In case the link URL is misspelled, please correct it. If any page is moved, redirect the link to the new page.

Now you have solved the problem for the internal links. But sometimes these pages link are also pointed by external website sources. For that, you have to set up 301 redirects. For that you can use The Redirection plugin, It is a useful tool for setting 301

It’s important to remember that if you delete or change the page, you must remove the URL from the Google search console and add a new URL, To ensure that traffic is not sent to broken links. To remove a broken link, Open the Google search console and click ‘Remove’, then paste the URL.

Respond to the visitor’s comment.

It is a good practice to respond to visitor comments. When someone sees an answer to a comment, they feel good about the blog and get the impression that you care about the visitors. This is beneficial for the user’s experience. It also indicates that you are attached to the user. Although SEO is not directly improved by comments, but it has a significant indirect impact.

Eliminating Spam Comments and Examine Your Spam Filters.

Eliminating Spam Comments is also factor of WordPress maintenance. Your readers could experience a negative impact from these spam comments. This is not good for search engine optimization, according to Google.

Additionally, it slows down your WordPress blog.

During the process of responding to comments, it is possible to remove spam comments. if you’ve received a lot of comments, spending hours trying to figure out what is or isn’t spam is not a good idea . It is also frustrating.

Deactivating the comments section is a possible solution, but it will disconnect communication with your readers. It will solve one problem, but it will also generate another.

Use of Anti-spam plugins.

A spam filter is available to deal with the problem of spam. Akismet is a spam plugin for WordPress. You need to change its setting to prevent real reviews from being deleted and lost.

Jetpack, Antispam Bee, and Anti-spam are among the other plugins that can prevent spam.

The problem of spam filter

Genuine comments can be flagged as spam by spam filters because plugins are not perfect. Just because they wrote something that is generally not expected.
Spam filters recognize spam comments based on certain algorithms. So they can sometimes filter some genuine comments if it recognizes something unexpected in the comments.
We need to verify if a genuine item is being filtered as spam. If that’s the case, move them from the spam folder to the comments by approving them.

After examining the spam folder, remove all spam comments. Otherwise, if you come back before the spam folder automatically empty, you have to recheck the old spam.

Optimize Your WordPress Database.

What is Data optimization

Data optimization is also a WordPress maintenance task. It helps to increase the speed of the website, which is ultimately a good factor for SEO.
When you install WordPress, it creates a new database, and as time passes, it stores posts, comments, plugins, and theme settings data and metadata.
Sometimes we edit posts, WordPress creates a new, updated copy of the post but it also resides old copies in the database. Now old post copies sit in the database while new post revisions are live on blog. These old post copies clutter our database.
Apart from that old plugin that are not in use also has their settings and metadata in the database and is not used, which also clutters the database.
Spam comments also reside in the database. The database also contains trash, transient options, orphaned metadata, and so on.
All this useless data clutters our database. Removing this data from a database is called data optimization.

The benefit of data optimization.

All this junk data in the database increases the size of the database and decreases the performance of the search, writing, and reading operations in the system. As a result, it slows down your WordPress blog.
Also, it increases the backup size. So we need more space to store backups, and a bigger database size also consumes more time for backup and restore.
By optimizing the database, we can improve our WordPress blog’s speed, which helps to improve our SEO ranking. In addition to this, we can also save time and database space.

Optimization of the Data Base

Before implementing the database optimization, it’s very mandatory to create a complete WordPress backup. Otherwise, you may be at risk of losing all your data.
For data optimization, you can install a plugin. There are several plugins for database optimization.
A few examples are:
The WP-Optimize plugin has been developed by the team that developed the popular plugin UpdraftPlus for backup.
Its settings are easy, just install, activate, set options according to your needs, and run.

You can also set a post-revision limit smaller, to avoid having a large number of old posts stored before the next database optimization.

Revise and Update the content of the blog.

It is also an essential component of the WordPress maintenance task.
It’s mandatory to update your content as new information becomes available. If visitors see up-to-date information, they will come back to your blog, which is a positive sign. It’s beneficial for SEO because Google will update your content in the cache and label it as active.

Updating your blog is equally valuable as uploading new content. It’s crucial to maintain your ranking on the Google search page. This is time-consuming but less than creating new content.
In the end, I will suggest that having less content is better than having outdated content. So update your blog content regularly

Delete Junk files which are not in use.

sometimes we have files that are no longer in use, as images, old themes files, uninstalled plugins files, etc. Such useless files consume our hosting space.

Regularly deleting images and videos from the media library is necessary, otherwise they will accumulate significantly. At some point, it will be difficult for you to determine which files are in use or not. As soon as you discover that the file is not in use, delete the files.

When you delete posts, pages, and comments they go to the trash folder. by default, they stay there for thirty days. If you don’t want them you can delete them. But it is difficult to empty manually every time. For that, You can also decrease the span of time to keep these files in the trash. So it automatically deleted for you for set intervals.