Think about it. Let’s say you visit a website for the first time. The pages take forever to load. It keeps taking you to dead links. And the menu is hard to navigate. Would you ever revisit such a website? Probably not. For this reason, it’s important that you make your website as good as it can possibly be, so that both first-time and returning visitors enjoy the experience.

If you’re one of the over 445 million websites that run on WordPress, then maintaining your website is pretty easy. You have access to a wealth of freely available plugins. You can use these plugins to manage various aspects of your website, from performance and security through to fixing broken links. Also, WordPress itself is easy to navigate and use. So, even if you are a novice, getting the hang of the platform takes little time and effort.

Of course, if you lack the time, expertise, or resources to look after your website, then consider having a digital marketing agency build and manage your business website for you. They will create for you a beautiful and functional website, one that is secure, easy to scale, and has all the content and sales copy you need to promote your products and services in a way that will help attract customers.

Without further ado, here are a few quick and easy things you can do to optimize your WordPress website.

Update your WordPress plugins

WordPress plugins can help optimize your website in many ways. You can download plugins to automatically filter out spam comments, perform security scans, change your theme, and more.

As useful as these tools are, they require regular updating, especially when it comes to keeping your security measures up to date. The easiest way to do this is to automate the updating process, which you can do by accessing the ‘Plugin’ menu on your WordPress dashboard and applying ‘Enable Auto Updates’ to each of your plugins. When auto updates are enabled, WordPress will periodically send you an email every few weeks to tell you that your plugins have been updated. Alternatively, if you prefer to perform this task yourself, you are also free to manually update your plugins.

Visit and browse your website

When it comes to maintaining your WordPress website, it’s important to not just focus on the WordPress dashboard and actually visit your website often. Browse through as many pages as possible to make sure that each page works, they load quickly, and that all the internal and external links work properly.

This is a great way to catch any issues early before they impact the user experience. It also helps give you a feel as to what it’s like to actually navigate your website. This is a valuable experience; especially if your website has grown, has more pages than before, and contains a lot more content than when you first launched it.

As a result of browsing your website, this can help you identify poor-performing pages, areas where you can improve the navigation, slow-loading pages, and more. From there, you can use this information to optimize your website, so that it is as fast and secure as possible.

Change WordPress password

Few things are more important than keeping your WordPress website secure. One of the easiest ways to do this is to periodically change your password. This makes it harder for a potential hacker to figure out your password, as it means they basically have to start from square one each time you change it.

Furthermore, it’s a great way to make a new password that is harder to guess than the previous one. You can make it more complex by adding capital letters, numbers, and other miscellaneous symbols.

How often should you change your password? That’s entirely up to you. But try to change it at least once per year. Of course, if you’ve recently been the victim of a security breach, then change it as soon as possible.

Run performance tests

The speed of your website is crucial to retaining visitors. Your potential customers won’t stick around to wait for pages to load. If they don’t get what they want from you, quickly, then you’ll miss out on potential leads and sales.

In order to keep the performance of your website in pristine shape, run frequent performance tests. You can use free tools like Google PageSpeed Insight and GTmetrix to get an idea of how fast your website is. If there are any issues, these tools will tell you what they are, where they happen, and what you can do about them.

Some of the most common causes of performance issues include overly large images, too many non-essential plugins, excessive overhead in your database, and caching issues, to name a few. Fortunately, most of these issues are easy to remedy, once you know what you are looking for.

Optimise your content

Over time, the content on your website may need revising and refreshing. Perhaps you have added (or removed) some products or services? Maybe the direction of the business has changed, and you want to target a new audience?

Regardless of the reason for the change, your content should always reflect the state of your business in its current form, including the types of offers you make and the people you wish to attract.

The best way to do this is to review your existing content. Ask yourself important questions like: Does this say what I want it to say? Does it speak to my potential customers in a way that is most likely to resonate with their needs and wants? Does it represent where my business is at today?

If the answer to these questions is ‘No,’ then consider revising your content to better reflect the current state of your business. You can do this yourself, or, if your website is being managed by a digital marketing agency, they can utilise one of their in-house copywriters to give your sales copy a facelift.

Optimise your website’s database

The database on your WordPress website stores all the essential information about your site. This includes your content, images, theme settings, plugins, settings, and more. While having all your crucial information in one place is great, over time, the database will start to store data that is out of date or irrelevant.

Some examples of this are post revisions, spam comments, and transients (cached data that is stored on WordPress for a set amount of time. If left to their own devices, this data can start to slow down your website and impact the user experience.

In order to optimize your WordPress database, use a plugin like WP Rocket. Open up the ‘phpMyAdmin’ section of WP Rocket, followed by the SQL tab. There, you can delete a wide range of leftover data. Make sure you don’t accidentally delete any information that is vital to your website.

Fix broken links and 404 errors

Broken links and 404 errors, despite being used interchangeably to describe a broken page on a website, are slightly different.

A 404 error is an error message that shows up when a visitor goes to a URL that does not exist. This occurs when there is a problem on your website, not someone else’s. Meanwhile, a broken link typically describes an external link, one that takes the visitor to a website outside of your own.

Either way, neither situation is ideal, as it stops a visitor dead in their tracks on their quest for more information and answers. That’s why you should fix broken links and 404 errors as soon as possible.

How do you know when a link is broken? Use a platform like Google Search Console to audit your website for broken links. Here, the tool will tell you exactly what pages are broken, why, and how to fix them. You should also test an external links you have on your website, making sure they still lead to the same website that you originally intended it to.

Verify your website back ups

WordPress has the ability to automatically back up your site data on a frequent basis. This can happen once a day to several times a week. This also applies to when your website is updated or modified, so any new pages or content get backed up as well.

While this is super convenient, it is still worth making sure the backup process is actually working. How?

Use a plugin like BlogVault Backup Services. Use the ‘Test Restore’ function to automatically restore the most recent back up of your website, and then visit it to confirm that it reflects the current state of your website. Doing so in this testing environment does not affect the current state of your live website, so there is no risk.