When you create a WordPress site, it seems pretty clean and light in weight in the beginning. Over time, when your business starts to grow, you’ll need to add new themes, plugins, content, images, tags, users, etc. on your site to keep up.
This increases your site size. It can be a bit problematic since you’re not the only person using your site. When visitors visit your site, it will take time to load. A bloated site can result in traffic loss. It will be even more challenging to manage your site and traffic loss together.
That’s why it is essential to clean up your site frequently to save yourself from catastrophic consequences in the future. Look out for unnecessary data, unused plugin, and themes, large size images, broken links, etc.
Also, make sure everything on your WordPress site is up-to-date.
How often you clean up your site depends upon your site size. Large websites that often upload data in bulk will naturally need maintenance more frequently. However, if you have activated an automated data cleaning system, you don’t have to regularly clean up your site.
Ways to clean-up and maintain your WordPress site
Now you know why maintaining your WordPress site is essential. Let’s discuss how you can clean and maintain your site. Enlisted below are five useful methods for your WordPress site maintenance.
Hold on before you start with any of these; make sure to create your site’s backup. We suggest you use each technique step by step to get optimal results in the end.
Monitor your WordPress site’s security
Cyberpunks are always motivated to explore new ways to breach website security. Google blacklists malware-infected, which can damage your brand representation.
A malware-infected site can harm its visitors. The infected websites are capable of spreading malware on other sites as well. Hackers can use them to inject malicious code to cause disruption or steal confidential information of customers like the credit card pin or login credentials of a site.
Therefore, Codup recommends taking the necessary steps to secure your site.
To comprehend vulnerabilities, you can also use security plugins and make this task effortless.
Removing futile Themes and Plugins
There is a pool of resources in WordPress. Plugins and themes are two excellent and useful resources.
However, adding a dozen plugins and themes might put excessive strain on your site.
You can go to the dashboard for themes and remove all themes you’re not using to improve page loading time.
It’s an excellent idea to check each plugin one by one to find which plugin is taking extra space and you don’t need anymore. However, this task can be a bit tricky.
To help you out in this, you can use Marie Kondo’s approach to cleaning out clutter from your life. Her approach is to look at each object and question, “Does it spark joy anymore?”
This approach might look a little bit odd to use but believe us it can be very helpful. Go through your plugin directory and ask yourself if you need that plugin. If you don’t need it, then it’s the right time to renounce it.
Updating WordPress Regularly
Most of the websites use this CRM platform because of its stability. However, to ensure that everything works smoothly and efficiently, you need to keep your site updated.
Old versions of software might have security holes or compatibility issues with other tools integrated on your site.
Considering all the above-discussed issues, it becomes highly imperative to keep your site and all the elements integrated on it up-to-date.
However, we suggest you take your site to a staging environment before updating anything to prevent any damage. Once your website elements are updated, you can make it live.
Updating and Maintaining User Information
User Information is often overlooked during the site maintenance process. Some users believe it’s unnecessary to remove clutter from user information, but this can be a huge mistake. Keeping all the unnecessary data on your site can create confusion.
It’s an excellent idea to check everything is updated if you have assigned user roles to multiple people.
Delete user accounts which are longer in use. Make sure to check if the user info is correct and up-to-date.
Also, do make sure you have assigned the right user roles to the right user.
Delete Unnecessary Media Files
Media files such as images, videos, GIFstakes up a lot of space. This can affect your site loading speed. Therefore, you should delete extra and unused data to keep your site clean.
You can either go to the WordPress Media Library and delete unused media files manually.
You can use WordPress caching plugins to speed up your website.
However, this manual process is very time-consuming. For further assistance, you can use the Media Cleaner tool. It simplifies the whole clean up process, and it automatically deletes all the unused media files. It will throw all the unused data in a temporary trash folder so you can quickly figure out which data you have to delete permanently.
For future prevention, be more vigilant and avoid uploading unnecessary media files on your site, which can, later on, cause such a problem.
The leaner your media library is, the faster your site will load. Media files such as images are big and occupy a lot of space on your server. Therefore, it is essential to compress and optimize all the media files you upload on your site without compromising on its quality.
Several image compression plugins available in the WordPress plugins directory; some popular ones are WP Smush, EWWW Image Optimizer, Optimus, ShortPixel, and many more.
No matter which plugin you choose, it will automatically compress and optimize each image when uploaded.
In this way, WordPress maintenance task becomes much more accessible.
Endnote
WordPress is undoubtedly a bit difficult CMS platform to maintain. These maintenance tasks are a little too much to handle. However, if you’re facing any difficulty, we suggest you take WordPress maintenance and support services.
It depends on you which option you like; make sure to follow all the clean-up tasks discussed in the article to your WordPress site fully functional and secure.