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WordPress is one of the most popular website platforms in the world, with millions of users around the world. WordPress maintenance service experts enumerate their comprehensive guide to ensure that your WordPress site delivers tip-top performance.

1. Backup Your Site

A fundamental step in WordPress maintenance is to backup your site. If you employ a website maintenance agency, they can configure your site for automatic back up.

Backups are important in case the site gets hacked. Website maintenance in Singapore implements standard periodic backups so you can easily reinstall an older version of your site in case there is a breach. Backups offer peace of mind and easy resumption of operations in these cases.

2. WordPress Core Update

WordPress has a system for built-in updates for the core site. You need to ensure that all your WordPress features have the latest updates. If not, there could be a glitch because the versions are not compatible.

Keeping track of expiry dates of licenses and certifications can be tedious, and even automation can fail due to glitches, security breaches, or power outages. You can check with WordPress Updates for a manual check, but website maintenance in Singapore offers regular checks on a weekly basis.

3. Check if PlugIns and Themes are Up to date

Updates to each plugin and theme are important, specifically for security patches.

There are also feature updates that can enhance the performance of the plugin.

WordPress maintenance services also warn that some updates may end up incompatible with your system, and affect your site performance. This service is essential, since it’s not enough to automate the updates, but you also need to observe if it has adverse effects on your site, and be able to take action on updating your theme or plugins ensures you have access to the latest features.

Some updates to themes and plugins are to ensure compatibility with the latest release, so updating ensures your site won’t have any problems.

You can either regular updates manually or you can set up automated updates to save yourself time and hassle.

Either way, it’s a good idea to run any updates on your staging site before your live site to be sure they don’t cause any problems. Kinsta includes staging sites in all of its hosting plans, meaning that you can test plugin and theme updates, as well as core updates, in a safe environment before pushing them to your live site.

4. Moderating Comments and Deleting Spam

Part of the services of a WordPress maintenance service is moderating comments and deleting spam. There are tools for deleting spam, like Akismet, but using it can delete some legitimate comments. It is necessary to sift through the comments and also highlight genuine ones, even criticism, to give your site a responsive and transparent image.

5. Optimizing your Database

With your increasing content in your website, you will end up with unnecessary data. Website maintenance for eCommerce sites cite obsolete products as one of the main sources. These databases are added loads for your backup file, and should periodically be deleted.

6. Monitoring Bug and Error Logs

Activity in your WordPress blog is healthy, but there are also unwanted incidents. These are your error logs, and providers of website maintenance in Singapore are in charge of monitoring these. They should also check for bugs like slow responses from databases and REST API requests. These bugs under the surface are the causes of poor performance of the website.

7. SEO Audit

Aside from your database and error logs, WordPress maintenance services need to check content. This is where SEO audits come in. Use Google Analytics to ensure that the content you produce is optimized.

8. Fixing Dead/Broken Links

Optimizing your content SEO would not be beneficial if you are weighed down by dead and broken links. These do not only refer to external links, but also to broken or taken down images and non-formatted or misspelled links. Agencies who provide website maintenance in Singapore have efficient tools and methods for testing this on larger websites.

9. Optimize Images

Loading speed is a factor in website evaluation, so you need to be conscious about elements in your WordPress site. Images load longer than text, so a WordPress maintenance service should ensure that no images are unnecessarily large. You might miss them if there are guest posts or other contributors to your site.

10. Testing WordPress Forms

Forms are your way to interact and encourage participation with your audience. There are plugins like WPForms who can provide this. Website maintenance needs routine checks to ensure that these plugins send emails to the customer. The usual bug of this plugin is failure to send emails upon request of the audience.

11. Removing Unused Plugins

Speaking of plugins, a valuable task in WordPress maintenance is removing unused plugins. You will encounter better versions of plugins that you’ve acquired, and when you install them, forget to remove the previous one. These can build up over time.

12. Complete Site Performance Tests

All of these WordPress maintenance tasks will affect your performance. WordPress maintenance service providers will run complete site performance tasks, and see which tasks they need to implement.