Because your website is a living document, it will be essential for you to do these following suggestions as maintenance tasks for your website:
Ten Tasks for Website Maintenance:
1. Make and change strong passwords. Go to Dashboard - Settings-User- Generate password - update. If your website is hacked (usually because of weak passwords), and Google finds out, your website will be black listed. It is almost impossible to reverse this decision. You definitely don't want to go there!

2. Back up your website regularly - use the WP Back up plug in. Also back up your website manually to keep a zip file on your computer just in case you want to migrate your site to another host. It helps to give you control of your own property, which is like your own piece of real estate on the internet.

3. Do all the updates on activated plug ins, themes and WordPress. Perfecting and refining the user experience is what the updates are all about. They just keep getting better with every update.

4. Check your comments and delete any spam. Comments are a way that spammers get their links on your website. Don't allow it. You can also turn comments off completely

5. Test your forms to make sure they are working. Ask a friend to fill in the form to make sure you are getting the emails.

6. Test your links to make sure they are not broken. This can happen from time to time, for example, if you create a link to another website that is no longer hosted. Broken links add to a bad user experience.

7. Use SEO plugins like Yoast. This plug in links to google analytics and helps to optimize your website. Follow the suggestions given, and improve the website's exposure on the internet. A site map to index your pages will greatly increase your exposure to search engines. Another good plug in like revive-social will increasing drive your traffic at a surprising low cost.

8. Optimize images for faster loading. Plug ins such as Smush can re-size your images upon upload. If my images are in the 4 digit pixel range, I edit my image manually on upload and scale it down to 3 digits. Sometimes you can put too much trust in plug ins, especially the free ones.

9. Check out your website on different devices - is it easy to navigate on the ipad or phone? These days most people are using their mobile devices more so than a PC, so your website needs to keep up with the times. Consider changing to a responsive theme if you are not happy with the way your website operates on mobile devices. Consider also that Google uses responsiveness as one of their parameters because of its importance.

10. Keep your website information relevant and updated. Content is everything! Indeed, relevant content is everything. Search engines want to match searchers with relevant results, so make sure you are using the right keywords and phrases in your content.

 

Do these ten tasks monthly, all free and easy, to keep your website performing.