Spring Cleaning Checklist for your WordPress Website

Spring has come and gone, but don’t let that deter you from cleaning things up on your WordPress website.

Below we’ve rounded up (in no particular order) 10 areas worth looking at when cleaning up the back-end of your site.

Time to get crackin’!

Cleaning Up WordPress? Put These 10 On Your Checkliston you

1) Get Rid Of Unnecessary Plugins. Plugins can run multiple scripts and slow down your page load speed. If you have a few plugins that you don’t really need or that haven’t been updated in a long time, then delete them. There’s no need to carry around anything on your site that’s useless.

2) Update WordPress Core. Is keeping your WordPress core software updated really that important? Yes, yes it is. Writing the important of updates like this could take an entire post, but we’ll save that for another time. Just be sure you back-up you website before any and all updates you do. This will save you on the off chance something goes wrong.

3) Update Theme. Theme updates are just as important as updates to your WP core software. Often time, a theme update is to make sure that everything is compatible with the newest WordPress update, or it fixes bugs within the existing theme. As stated before, make sure you back-up your site before you update.

4) Clean Out Spam Comments. Spam comments are both irritating, and bad for your site’s ranking. Moving such comments to the trash isn’t enough. Go into your Dashboard and permanently delete those pesky varmint for good!

5) Delete Post Revisions. This is one that I’m sure people tend to forget about.  I like to use ManageWP to clean out my revisions, however, I’ve heard WP Optimize works great too.

4) Get Rid Of Unused Themes. Not only is this a waste of space, but leaving those themes both untouched can leave little holes in your site’s security.

5) Delete Media You’re Not Using. This can be time consuming, but it’s worth the effort. It may also be worth optimizing your pictures while you’re at it.

6) Run A Performance Check. Running a site performance check can give you and idea of what is slowing your site down, and what needs to be fixed. I like to use GTMetrix for this.

7) Delete Unused Tags.  This will just help keep things nice and tidy in the back-end.

8) Add Descriptions To Your Categories. This is yet another small but potent action for your site. Doing this is a great white-hat SEO practice, so don’t lose out on the opportunity.

9) Clean Up Broken Links. This would probably be at the top of my list. Broken links are bad for SEO and drastically hurt your rankings. Use a plugin like Broken Link Checker to see if you have any worth addressing.

10) Secure Your Site. Aside from regular back-ups (which I hope you’re doing anyway), making sure that your site is as secure as it can be is vital. Site hacks happen on a daily basis and by the thousands. It’s always best to think ahead and prepare for the worst. Some great free plugins for pumping up security on you site are iThemes Security, Wordfence Security, and All In One Security and Firewall.

A spring cleaning up your WordPress site is a great way to keep it going like a well oiled machine. Be sure to bookmark this page so that you can use it as a reference for both now, and in the future.

photo credit: Mufidah Kassalias via photopin cc