Maintaining your WordPress website can be done effectively with simple changes that anyone can make. You can make these changes manually or with the aid of a WordPress plug-in.

Below are five recommendations for maintaining your website if you’re unsure of where to begin.

1. Consistently Back-up Your Website

Backing up your website allows you to always have a recent version of your website saved just in case something should go wrong. It’s recommended to backup your WordPress website weekly, and daily if you make quite a few changes to it often. Your hosting provider typically provides backup services that you can take advantage of or you can manually download a copy through your site’s FTP (File Transfer Protocol). Various plug-ins like VaultPress can also perform automatic backups of your website.

2. Keep Your Site Safe & Secure

Your website’s security is of utmost importance. Unfortunately, with the increase of hackers and security threats, it’s a vital step that cannot be set aside. The best way to keep your site secure is to install a reliable plug-in like WordFence Security or All in One WP Security and Firewall.

3. Safely Manage User Accounts

When hiring someone else to work on your website, such as a website designer or a blogger, it’s important to assign them their own username and password. For added security, use a unique username and a lengthy password with multiple letters, numbers, and characters.

4. Optimize Your Website’s Database

The specific task of optimizing your database helps with your website’s overall performance. It removes items that are no longer necessary such as blog post revisions, deleted posts, and spam comments. Install a plug-in like Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions to automatically tackle this time-consuming task.

5. Increase Your Website’s SEO Performance

Every website owner wants to increase their organic traffic and improve their search engine rankings. One way to accomplish this is to increase your website’s SEO performance. Not only does it enhance the user’s experience, but it also brings more traffic to your site without using paid ads. One of the most effective plug-ins for SEO is the Yoast SEO plug-in.

Have you implemented any of these changes for your website?