How to perform WordPress maintenance
Paco Marchante
26/06/2018
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Once we have our website with WordPress running and open, we must not only upload articles, products, etc. We have to maintain WordPress or else we will be abandoning the engine of our website.
WordPress makes it easy for its users to be able to maintain the CMS in a comfortable and simple way, but we must not confuse simple and comfortable with easy. We must know what we are pressing, if the updates do not produce errors, it may happen that updating a plugin, theme or WordPress may cause some incompatibility and make the web stop working.
So that it does not give us the dreaded white screen of death, in today's article I will teach you how to maintain a WordPress site so that we do not have to die trying.
Contents
Before you start doing anything you have to make a backup copy!
The first thing to do before updating is to make a backup. For this we can easily do it with plugins like Duplicator (The only thing that is not automatic, we must enter to make a backup). Another plugin with which we can make backups is UpdraftPlus.
It is mandatory before updating anything to make a backup. Any version, be it a plugin, theme or WordPress, can have some code that creates an incompatibility and produces an error. If we do not have a backup, going back is a difficult task, but if we have the backup, we would only have to reinstall the backup to fix what we have broken.
control the updates
You control the updates and that it is not the updates that control you.
In WordPress there are three elements that must be updated: These are the core of WordPress, plugins and theme that we use at the time. I say the theme that we use at that moment because the themes that are not active are of no use to us. Be careful if we are using a child theme (A "child theme" in WordPress is a theme that inherits functionality from another theme, called a "parent theme") DO NOT we must delete the parent theme.
In what order should we update?
Many times we will find ourselves in the situation that we have to update a version of WordPress and also plugins or the theme. In any of the three cases we see three types of updates:
- micro update: refers to a bug fix, and/or has little change. A micro version is when, for example, you change 1.0.0 a 1.0.1. We should not worry too much about this type of updates, we can leave them automated, although it is good practice to have automatic updates deactivated and enter regularly to update since we will save ourselves more than one scare.
- Minor update: here undergoes minor changes and/or bug fixes. A minor version is when, for example, you change 1.0.0 a 1.1.0. I would no longer leave these types of updates automated and would control them manually.
- major update: Here it undergoes great changes and improvements. We must be more careful when updating a major version, we mean when we talk about a major version when it changes from 1.0.0 a 2.0.0. Make sure it won't break anything before you hit the update button.
Don't forget to backup!
The first thing that we should have done, as I said before, is to make the Backup, and if you have not already done so, you know what you have to do before continuing reading.
Ok, now we have our backupWell, the first thing we should check is whether the versions of both the plugins and the themes are compatible with the latest version of WordPress. If they are compatible, we must first update the plugins and theme and then the version of WordPress.
If it isn't, I suggest waiting to update as it could trigger one error after another on our site.
If we only have to update the plugins or theme, there is usually no problem of incompatibility with the version of WordPress. Since it is supposed to be proven by the author.
It is also Good practice DO NOT update the same day the update comes out, we must wait a couple of days and read the forums to see if this update, whether it is WordPress, a plugin or a theme, is failing. Another good practice that we recommend and do is, before upgrading in production, upgrade on a test server to verify that the upgrade does not fail.
If, even taking all the care, an error occurs, we can easily solve it by installing the backup.
If we have more than one WordPress site, it is highly recommended to use ManageWP with which we can manage the maintenance of various sites from your control panel. A tool that will save us a lot of time if we manage and maintain several websites.
Keep your site secure
We must protect our WordPress since we can be the target of cyberattacks. Not only to protect our business on the Internet, we can have customer or subscriber data. We can easily fix this by configuring security plugins, of which I recommend iTheme Security or All In One:
Solid Security – Password, Two Factor Authentication, and Brute Force Protection
I also leave you an article by Victor Saenz about how to protect our WordPress.
Control your broken links (Error 404)
The first thing to say about the 404 is that they are not bad. If we know how to make the most of this page we will be able to convert using 404 error page.
Even if we use them to our advantage, we must control the links that produce 404 errors. We must redirect, through 301 redirects, the urls that we have deleted and that are generating traffic for us. Leaving 404 errors will cause us to lose a large number of users because they cannot find the content for which they entered our website.
To solve the 404 we must add inside the .htaccess (DO THIS ONLY IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TOUCHING):
Redirect 301 /url-that-doesn't-exist http://www.urlwherewewantredirect.com
For those who prefer not to edit the .htaccess I leave the following plugin:
With this plugin we can perform the same redirects and control the 404 in a simple way.
Google made it clear that:
The fact that some URLs on a website return the 404 code does not, by itself, harm the site, nor is it taken into account in Google search results.
Spam out
Spam can be a big problem. To protect our site from spam in the comments we can activate in 'Settings> Comments> Although we will have to approve them manually, it will eliminate the problem of spam comments.
Also in the forms we should add a CAPTCHA, in order to fully protect ourselves against spam. For this we can use plugins such as the following:
Keep the database clean
Every time we install a plugin or themes (which do not come from the official WordPress repository), they add data to the database. This is not a problem, the problem appears when we delete the plugin and it does not delete that data. When removing a plugin or theme, they should remove the content they enter into the database, but this is not always the case, so it is not bad from time to time to use WP Optimize to clean our database:
WP-Optimize – Cache, Compress images, Minify & Clean database to boost page speed & performance
Keeping our database clean will make our site go much faster.
If we are doing the maintenance of our site on a weekly basis, we can have a great installation of WordPress.
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See you in the next article.
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