How to keep your WordPress website happy & healthy

If you have a blog on your website, you’ll want to keep this section clean. If you have notifications turned on, you’ll likely get an email notifying you have a new comment. Typically, comments need to be approved before it shows up on your blog. I recommend turning this notification on if you don’t have it turned on already.

You can approve and answer real comments in a timely manner, plus you can catch spam and fake comments before they even get posted. Not only is this safer for your readers but less spam comments means it won’t affect your Google search ranking.

Then once a week during your maintenance schedule you can answer your comments and mark any spam comments. 

Marking comments as spam instead of deleting them will actually help WordPress and spam plugins to detect the newest and types of spam comments and where it comes from so that they can be blacklisted.

If you have a website back-up plan as part of your hosting package and it’s scheduled to back-up automatically, I highly recommend logging into your hosting provider to make sure that your last scheduled back-up was successful.

If you don’t have a back-up plan in your hosting package, you can install a back-up plugin like UpdraftPlus and schedule automatic back-ups daily, weekly or monthly. In this case, check the Updraft plugin in your WordPress account to make sure your last scheduled back-up was successful.

404s can actually affect our Google ranking and it should be part of our normal process to check if anyone is seeing our 404 page more often than they should. 404s can be hard to track especially if we have a more established site and many changes have happened over the years.

In my plugin tech stack I use a plugin called Redirection. It logs each time someone lands on my 404 page and which page they were actually trying to view. Now, this can be a false positive because bots often try to access commonly used URLs such as /about-me/ or /contact-us/. 

If you don’t have those URLs the bot will be presented with a 404. These logged 404s we can ignore. Google is smart enough to know when it’s a bot or a real user trying to access our site.

The ones we pay attention to are the URLs we know should be working and perhaps we changed the link structure or changed the category of the page or blog post it belonged to. This changes the URL and if you linked to this from your navigation or other pages, then we’ll have broken links that lead to a 404.

So make it a habit to do a quick check to make sure there are no broken links.

If you haven’t already, I recommend enabling automatic updates for each plugin. Every time a plugin is updated, WordPress will send you a notification at the end of the day which ones have been automatically updated. This can save you a lot of time.

And during your weekly maintenance check, you can navigate through your website to make sure everything is just as it should be. 99% of the time there are no issues.

If you use Thrive Themes and auto updates are enabled, make sure you don’t skip this step as they do updates quite often (which is great!) but sometimes you have to re-save a page for it to display properly again as some caching could have occurred in mid-update. 

This has only happened to me twice over all of these years, but twice is enough for me to mention it so that you make it a habit to navigate through your own site like a regular visitor

Wordfence is in my plugin tech stack and it does a great job of being the first line of defence against bots and brute force attacks. It also keeps an eye out for plugins and themes that are not up-to-date.

It automatically does a periodic scan of your website for any changes to files that shouldn’t be touched, and - one of the most useful things from Wordfence - keeping an eye out for plugins that are no longer on the WordPress approved list.

If you’re following the suggested plugins from WPLS this shouldn’t happen very often but you never know! So Wordfence is a handy tool to check in on during your maintenance schedule.

Once you log in to your admin account of your WordPress site, you first land on your Dashboard. On your Dashboard is a module called Site Health Status. It will either show a green, yellow or red circle to indicate any issues your site might have. This check is automatic with your WordPress install.

My note for this is to take this health status with a grain of salt. It may tell you that a scheduled event is late, or that you should delete any inactive plugins or themes. In general, if we are not using a plugin and it is inactive, we should remove it. It’s just one less thing to update and worry about.

As for themes, WordPress actually recommends that you have a back-up theme (it can be any theme at all) in case your current activated theme fails (which never happens). So WordPress contradicts itself in some ways here.

However, something to look out for is if Site Health Status indicates any database issues or to update your database PHP version. Then this is something to pay attention to. To find out how to update your PHP version there’s a video for it coming soon.

If you have a contact form, this is a very handy plugin to have and check in on. Mail log keeps a log of all emails sent from your WordPress website. For example, when a user submits a contact form, it is always a good idea to send them an automated response to say that their message has been received.

It, one, gives the user a confirmation that the from submitted was successful and two, we can see if this message was successfully sent through the mail log plugin.

If there was an error, you will know that someone was trying to contact you but it never reached your inbox and the confirmation message never reached their inbox.

The log does keep a copy of their message so you at least know who submitted the contact form and what the message was.

Pretty handy! Give Mail logging – WP Mail Catcher a try.

If you’re running an e-commerce or membership site that allows for your users to login to view content, checking in on your user list can be a good idea to make sure you don’t have any unusual usernames registered and if you do have Wordfence installed, you can check live traffic to check of log ins and log outs and see if any members have had issues logging in.

You’ll also be able to see this on your WordPress dashboard with the Wordfence module.