The latest statistics (July 2017) indicate that 59.2% of all websites using a known content management system (CMS) are based on the WordPress platform (28.4% of all websites on the internet). That is a significant market share that I believe has been well earned by the almost unlimited  customizability of WordPress, thanks to its large community of users and developers.

However, building a WordPress site is just the beginning. Once you have your site online, you also need to maintain and update it. Among other things, this is absolutely critical to protect your site against security threats from hackers and hacker bots.

Your WordPress site is a powerful system made of several parts. This includes your WordPress hosting, WordPress software itself, plugins, and themes.

On top of that, you add your own content with text and images. Together, all of them make a website that is loved by your visitors and customers.

However, this system needs to be looked after to ensure optimal performance. There are few simple maintenance tasks that you can perform on a regular basis to ensure that your website is working at its best. ~ WpBeginner

A recent article at WpBeginner titled 13 Crucial WordPress Maintenance Tasks to Perform Regularly lists the important tasks that all websites based on the WordPress platform should be doing on a regular basis.

All of the following are included as part of the Psychlinks website optimization and management service, whether you host your site with us or with someone else.

• Create a Complete Backup of Your Website, preferably daily.
• Check and Update All WordPress Files on an ongoing basis.
• Check and Delete Spam Comments if your site allows comments or reviews.
• Test All Your WordPress Forms to ensure that they are still working properly after updates: if your potential clients, customers, or subscribers can’t easily reach you, they will likely go to a competitor – most won’t take the time to let you know.
• Optimize Your WordPress Database: failure to do this can generate database errors and slow down your website, in turn impacting on how well you rank in search engine results, especially on mobile devices.
• Run Performance Tests to ensure that your site continues to meet current guidelines for high search engine, local search, and mobile search results.
• Find and Fix 404 Errors: these are errors on your site indicating that a specific page or post cannot be found.
• Find and Fix Broken Links: if you link to other (external) sites from your site, those links should be checked periodically to ensure that the page still exists at that location.
• Perform a Thorough Content and SEO Audit on a regular basis to ensure that recent changes or additions to the content of your site are optimized for best search engine ranking.
• Optimize Images on Your WordPress Site to ensure that they load quickly: page load speed is a search engine ranking factor for search engines and especially for mobile search.
• WordPress security review to guard against new emerging security threats on the internet.

I would add:

• Monitor and take necessary action against attempted security attacks against your site (e.g., by blocking the IP addresses of attackers, scanning for changed files, changing passwords if the site has received a large number of “brute force” hacking attempts, etc.).