Checklist to Maitain a Wordpress Based Site
Over past one year, I have been playing around with my Wordpress based site. This involved primarily two activities. First and most important is adding and improving contents of the site. This is publishing new interesting articles. It is bit challenging activity, cause you have to have good contents that will pull visitors continuously. But there is another activity which also made me invest considerable time. This is maintaining the website and the content management tool – Wordpress. Now, after so many iterations, I am ready with a list of activities that we mostly do to keep our site well maintained. I am not going to explain in detail why do you do some of the things. Instead let us keep it crispy..
1. Update Wordpress to new version regularly. Worpress admin screen shows you which latest version is available now. Just for precaution, check if the version is stable or you want to wait for any major bug fix. If everything is alright, go ahead and update using manual or automatic process.
2. Update outdated plugins regularly. You can see the plugin left menu link highlighted with a number of plugins needing upgrade. If you click on the link, then you can see which plugin needs upgrade. Click on auto upgrade and all will be done. Few plugins may require some special attention. But those actions will be pointed out clearly.
3.Back up your web site regularly. Your hosting service provider gives this features. Check with them, and see what all you need to do. But it is advisible to back up site before any major change, and also when there is considerable change successfully made.
4. Approve comments regularly. Visitors keep posting/submitting comments to your blog. If you have set to review each comment before publishing on site, then it is better to come back to admin console and approve/delete the comments regularly. Sometimes comments are just to create back links to other websites. You can choose to filter such comments as well.
5. Monitor Adsense Returns. If you are having adsense items places on your site, then check which of those are performing better. You can think of replacing non-performing items with available alternatives.
6. Changing Theme is an interesting step. Some site owners like to continue with one theme for very long time. It may be that they want to keep identity of the site through a constant look and feel. Some of us prefer to change the theme. Here are the common things you must take care when you change your theme. Check Wordpress version above which the theme works. Also check if all those features that you need are available with the selected theme.
a. Add subscription (RSS, subscribe count, email subscription etc.) related stuff.
b. If you have site icon or trademark then introduce those in new template also.
c. Add desired adsense elements at theme supported locations, or wherever you need.
d. Check how sidebar will displayed. See if the widgets selected through Wordpress admin console are going to be dynamically displayed by the theme.
e. Check all code snippets you added to allow sharing of your blog pages on different sites are added to your new theme.
f. Add statistic related code snippet to the footer of your new theme.
g. After activation of theme, check all ‘TYPEs’ of pages, if all are displayed correctly on your supported browsers (and versions also.)
Hope this helps you to maintain your site properly. If you feel, I have missed anything then do add it. Enjoy blogging!!!
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