How to Manage WordPress Sites: 75 Tasks To Keep Your Site Running Smoothly

Managing a WordPress site means performing daily, weekly and monthly tasks to help your site run smoothly. Use this checklist to help you manage WordPress sites either for yourself or your web design clients.

75 WordPress Site Management Tasks & Tips

The list below includes both one-time tasks for newer WordPress sites and repetitive tasks that will need to be performed on a regular basis.
WordPress Backup Tasks

1. Install a WordPress backup plugin to start running automatic WordPress backups
2. Confirm your automatic WordPress backups are running at scheduled intervals
3. Confirm backups are delivering to a safe, off-site storage destination & set up redundant backups (two or more backup file storage locations)
4. Confirm backup files include WordPress database and all files (media library, themes, plugins, etc.)
5. Consider using Stash Live (real-time WordPress backups) if you manage a more active site
6. Delete any old locally-stored backups (these are backups stored on your own server)
7. Delete old backup files stored off-site to reduce storage usage
8. Keep a current version of the Import script file on hand

WordPress Security Tasks

9. Update WordPress core to latest version
10. Use a WordPress security plugin to help perform important WordPress security tasks
11. Run the WordPress Security Check feature to activate recommended WordPress Security features
12. Enable 404 Detection because of phishing and other attempts
13. Enable the Banned Users setting to block specific IP addresses and user agents from accessing your site
14. Review logs of Banned User IPs
15. Enable WordPress brute force protection to protect your site against attackers that try to randomly guess login details to your site
16. Enable Network Brute Force Protection to protect your site against known attackers before they reach your site
17. Run a WordPress Malware Scan
18. Enable User Logging to log user actions such as login, editing or saving content and other actions
19. Disable the File Editor in WordPress Tweaks
20. Harden WordPress by using the Away Mode setting to limit access to your WordPress login and admin area (for example, overnight or while youre on vacation)
21. Whitelist your own IP Address
22. Review WordPress file permissions
23. Remove the Admin user
24. Change WordPress salts & secret keys
25. Activate and set up WordPress two-factor authentication

WordPress Theme & Plugin Tasks
Note: be sure to run a backup before updating themes, plugins or WordPress core.

26. Confirm premium theme and plugins have current licenses (this is usually how version updates are communicated to your WordPress site)
27. Update current theme to latest version
28. Update active plugins to latest version
29. Delete and completely remove unused themes and plugins
30. Review new plugin and theme features for implementation

Comments Tasks

31. Approve & reply to pending comments
32. Empty spam comments
33. Make sure an anti-spam service like Akismet is activated to help reduce comment spam

Uptime Monitoring Tasks

34. Monitor WordPress uptime to track hosting performance
35. Review uptime/downtime stats for uptime percentage, total downtime and number of downtimes
36. Enable email notifications for downtime

Blog Tasks

37. Add new posts weekly to keep blog fresh
38. Review top-performing posts for improvements
39. Add & confirm email newsletter signup is working
40. Confirm social sharing buttons are working
41. Add featured images to posts
42. Review Post drafts & delete unneeded posts
43. Empty Posts stored in Trash

Image Tasks

44. Optimize images for the web (reduce file sizes for images above 600KB)
45. Delete unused images from the Media Library
46. Review and add alt tags to images in posts and pages

Page Tasks

47. Audit older pages for content updates
48. Empty Pages in Trash
49. Review Pages in Draft
50. Fill unused Widget areas if possible

User Tasks

51. Delete unused or unneeded user accounts
52. Encourage Admin users to enable WordPress two-factor authentication & better WordPress password security
53. Review user access levels and adjust roles as necessary
54. Encourage Admins / Editors / Contributor Users to set up their Gravatar profile images (anyone that writes content or replies to comments)

Contact Page Tasks

55. Confirm current contact information (Email, Social, Phone, etc.)
56. Review Contact form confirmation email
57. Review Contact form submission delivery
58. Reply to contact form submissions
59. Consider using conditional logic to deliver canned contact form responses
60. Update FAQs to reflect common customer or client questions

Portfolio Tasks

61. Update portfolio with images of latest projects
62. Add new testimonials

SEO & Analytics Tasks

63. Install a WordPress SEO plugin to help with basic SEO
64. Connect Google Analytics and activate Google Search Console for your WordPress site
65. Submit a sitemap for WordPress site
66. Audit Pages and Posts for keyword-focus
67. Add missing meta descriptions to Posts and Pages
68. Review analytics data for total page views and unique visitors
69. Review referral traffic and inbound links
70. Review Google Console data (Search Traffic, Google Index, Crawl)
71. Set up and review Goals in Google Analytics
72. Review Behavior Flow
73. Review Page load times
74. Consider Page Speed suggestions
75. Audit Site for Mobile-responsiveness and usage

Managing WordPress sites can get pretty time-consuming (and maybe overwhelming), especially if you have more than one site.
Contact HavilahMedia Group to help manage your site!