Running a blog is not just about posting fresh contents always; there are blog maintenance routines I carry out daily or weekly on my blog to keep it running smoothly. To keep any system running smoothly, one must ensure to always perform routine maintenance on such system to keep it performing optimally.
If you are a blogger and you do not have routine maintenance for your blog you may run into an “avoidable” problem someday so that is the reason why I have decided to share my routine blog maintenance activities with you on this post. Routine blog maintenance won’t take you much time, once you have decided on the routine you simply ensure to observe it and your blog will run smoothly without the fear of running into troubles someday.
I know you may be thinking when will I have time to carry out routine maintenance on my blog? You may already have been carrying out such routine maintenances without knowing. And I want to also state that carrying out routine blog maintenance for your blog is one of the best blogging practices every blogger should practice.
Routine Blog Maintenance Checklist
1. Backup your blog regularly: Blog backup is definitely the most important blog maintenance routines for every blog, backup your blog weekly or at least monthly.
2. Check for Broken Links on your blog at least weekly, I use Online broken link checker to search my blog for broken links. After reading Enstine’s “How CommentLuv Plugin is Damaging Your SEO!”, I decided it will be nice to compile my routine blog maintenance checklist and share with you.
3. Update your blog plugins: WordPress plugin updates are always available and sometimes out of our busy schedule we may not take few seconds to update our plugins to its latest versions, please always ensure your plugins are up to date by updating it.
4. WordPress Optimization: WordPress optimization is a necessary routine blog maintenance practice every WordPress blogger should perform. The WordPress auto-save saves revisions or articles whenever you are typing an article so you won’t lose your write up, these revisions build up and consume memory and may slow down your blog, I normally use a plugin called WP-Optimize to keep my database clean by removing the post revisions and spam. With this plugin you can run optimize command on your WordPress core tables.
5. Get rid of spam comments/trackbacks: Blogging and spam comments are like Bonnie and Clyde. Except you have ensured serious measures against spam comments and trackbacks and have kept them to its barest minimum on your blog, take some time out to clean up your spam comments.
6. Database Optimization: Take some time out and optimize your blog’s database for better performance. You can read Babanature’s post titled “Optimizing Your WordPress Database For A Better Performance” for more on this.
7. Image Optimization: At least every weekend, I try to optimize the images I used during the week on my blog for better performance. Check out some “Online Tools for Image Compression and Optimization” I often use for my image optimization. These tools help me reduce the image file sizes and improve performance of my blog in general.
8. Linking within my blog: As I publish new articles I may not have the time to immediately start looking for related old articles on my blog to begin linking them, it’s easier when you link a new article to an old one, but linking an old article to a new one will involve you digging up your archives and searching for the articles, so I mostly perform this routine maintenance during weekends. I simply dig around and look for old posts on my blog and link them to related new posts.
9. Revisit Old posts: Over time one tends to improve in knowledge and writing skills, so take some time out and revisit your old posts and give them a touch, improve your grammar, correct your typos, carry out SEO tasks on them etc.
10. Eliminate unused plugins/Themes: Take a visit to your plugin section, access the plugins you have on your blog and eliminate those plugins you don’t necessary need to run your blog. Deactivate those ones you don’t often use. Same with themes, delete any theme you may have installed that you are not using any more on your blog.
Do you think I forgot any important routine blog maintenance on my checklist? Please help me by adding it on the comment section below, remember to subscribe to my RSS feed.
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