Blogging 101: Blog Maintenance

Every so often, it’s good to do a bit of blog maintenance. This is to make sure your site is running smoothly and everything you’ve worked hard for is working as it should.

Blog maintenance is all of those little tasks that aren’t creating content or promoting content. The tasks that you often forget about, but keep your blog at its best, and gives you the chance to improve problem areas.

Daily Maintenance

Visit your website

Don’t just visit the backend of your site, make sure you’re visiting the front end that your visitors see. This is the easiest and fastest way to realise when something isn’t working right. It could be your site is taking too long to load, images aren’t showing correctly or your newest post that you scheduled hasn’t gone live.

With checking every day, it means it’s less likely your audience will notice these issues before you. It also means you can work to fix any issues as soon as you see them, instead of someone else having to tell you.

Check your comments

Even if I have limited spare time in my day, I take the time to ensure any comments I’ve received are approved or sent to spam and trash depending on what they are. WordPress is usually good at pushing spam comments into spam, but I do find that a lot of my comments need approving on a daily basis.

You should also aim to comment back, and if you have the time try and visit each commenters blog if they have one. This is more of a suggestion though as it helps to keep involved in the community.

Check for updates

WordPress usually tells me I have updates for themes and plugins multiple times a week. So most days I need to update something. Some people do leave updating as a once a week thing, but most plugins are much safer when updated straight away.

Weekly Maintenance

Test your menus and pages

Every week or so, just have a quick look through all your menu and navigation links to check that you’re taking your audience to the right place. For example, my ‘books’ link up top should take you to a specific page rather than the tags page like the ‘beauty’ link. I know this, however if for some reason that doesn’t happen my audience won’t know that I’ve created a books page for all my reviews.

Backup your site

You can do this daily, weekly or monthly, but I prefer weekly for me. I used Bluehost who automatically do this for me, and I can just go into my login and download the backup. If you use another host, they probably also have backups but check on their site just in case.

Free WordPress users can also ‘export’ their site in settings, so don’t worry if you’re not self-hosted! There’s still a way to save all your hard work.

Monthly Maintenance

Test site speed

Your site speed is important because if it’s too slow, people may leave. So don’t forget to check your site, which you can do for free through Google’s TestMySite. They also have PageSpeed Insights which lets you know suggestions with how to improve this!

I would also recommend that you check your site is mobile friendly as we’re always on our phones nowadays.

Check for broken links

Check your site for any broken links by using an online checker. This way you can update links which helps your site health and usability. If your audience keeps clicking on broken links, they may feel frustrated and leave.

Deactivate and delete unused plugins

Plugins use up the servers resources, and so if you have too many plugins which are unused, you’re adding an unnecessary strain. Deactivate any plugins you’re not using, and if you’re still not using them after a few months, you’re probably safe to delete them.

Check Google Analytics

See your sites performance by checking Google Analytics. See which pages gain the most traffic, and which days are your better days to post. You can also determine your target audience to improve your future content, and look at successful posts to determine what content is preferred.

Check Search Console

See your sites performance by checking Google Search Console. See which pages are already ranking in search engines, and determine which ones may need improving. Example: If you can see that a page is ranking but not converting then you can alter the metadata to make it more appealing. This is a good way to create a to-do list of blog improvements you can make monthly.

Clean out your trash posts/comments/media

Having too much stored on your site can also add strain, so make sure you delete any old images, posts or comments which aren’t necessary. If need be move those drafts to somewhere else if you think they could go somewhere, but you’ve not touched them for over a month.

So are you ready for your blog maintenance?