The Ultimate WordPress Website Maintenance Checklist

Posted by Ben Crook on 22 September 2017

Focusing on the daily upkeep and maintenance of your fundraising website will ensure that your site is optimal at all times. In turn, this will help improve your charity’s brand credibility as well as increase your sites traffic.

Although WordPress is known as the most powerful, user-friendly and easy-to-use CMS (Contact Management System), without proper maintenance it can fall into disarray.

If you are running a WordPress powered website, then here is a website maintenance checklist that can help you keep your website secure, up-to-date and ensure that your donors have a delightful browsing experience.

Here are 10 tasks you can undertake in order to make your site user friendly, effective for search engine optimisation(SEO) and to boost your sites traffic and ranking, according to the bigrockcoupon.in team.

1) Daily backup of the entire site and database

Backing up your website is paramount due to the constant threat of hackers and security. By doing this daily you are ensuring the most up to date content can be republished if the worst should happen. It is best to get a professional to back up your database as it contains sensitive information.

2) Complete a website speed audit

The best way to carry out a speed audit is to use Google page speed insights which will score your website and give you tips and tricks on how to improve the performance of your website.

3) Update site content regularly

Content is a search engines bread and butter and forms part of an important strategy to attract and entice users to your website. Making sure you have unique and fresh content is vital when trying to build your readership. For example, charity’s can publish regular blog content around how to donate, where the funds are going, and how their communities are getting involved.

4) Update your sites WordPress plugins, themes and widgets

It is now an important part of Googles algorithm to update your themes and plugins in WordPress. Furthermore, it is necessary to have the latest updates for security reasons.

5) Upgrade WordPress to the latest version

Updating WordPress is important for installing the latest plugins and technology. Without updating WordPress you may fall behind the latest digital trends. You can update WordPress on the homepage of your dashboard when you log into WordPress.

6) Clear your trash and spam comments

Clearing trash and spam comments is important to in still authority in your blog content. Sometimes spam comments add dodgy links in the comments section which can put users off of your content. This varies depending on what plugin you use for comments.

7) Checking for broken links and fixing 404 errors

Nothing is more infuriating than a broken page or link. Redirect all broken links to a relevant page. Remember to optimise your 404 page for the best user experience. You can check broken links with this free redirect check tool.

8) Optimise your websites images

Your site speed will depend on the weight of your images. Make sure your images are nice and light in size but do not compromise on quality. A good tool for this is RIOT.

9) Review your Google analytics

Make sure you benchmark your traffic by checking the traffic via Google Analytics. You should be checking this every month and keeping an eye on your traffic sources to check which campaigns are doing well. For example, as a charity you will want to know how donors are finding your website and which channels are performing the best to drive donations, such as social media campaigns, PR articles or other referral links.

10) Regularly check your sites compatibility with all mobile devices and browsing platforms

More and more mobile searches occur every day. It is imperative your website is fully functional on mobile. The best way to do this is to make your website responsive. Keep testing your website on various platforms and browsers to ensure everyone gets the best user experience online.

If you found this interesting, you might be want to find out how integrating videos into your fundraising campaign can help you raise more for your cause.

Ben Crook

Chief Operating Officer

Ben is at the forefront of every project in Givergy, listing and actioning constant improvements across the business. With over a decade of experience in the charity and events sector he brings a deep understanding of what the fundraising industry needs to operate effectively and efficiently.