Just as your website needs to be maintained, so does your self-hosted WordPress installation. WordPress software has been updated ten times in just the past year, adding new features and closing security loopholes as they are discovered during use. In addition, plugins are constantly being updated and should be kept current as well. Here’s a checklist of what you should be looking for and when to tackle these tasks.

Daily:

1. Check and delete spam comments; approve any non-spam caught by mistake. Akismet can be set to delete spam comments after 14 days, but it’s easier to check when you have 20 or 30 to glance through instead of 250.

2. Check for new users that appear suspicious. Certain spammers target WordPress installations where new users may register without approval, in the hope that new users will be allowed posting privileges. If so, they can add spam posts dated far in the past so that they don’t show up in your list of recent posts, and hope you won’t notice them.

The best way to combat this: If you want to allow users to register on your blog, look at Settings -> General and be sure that the New User Default Role is set to Subscriber. Subscribers can read and comment but cannot make new posts.

If you start getting many suspicious user registrations and don’t want to manually check them all, take a look at the SABRE plugin. SABRE has a number of ways to check whether new registrations are being performed by humans or bots, and it’s very good at weeding out and denying the bots. I use it on all my own blogs and recommend it to all my clients.

3. Check for any plugins that need to be updated. You will see a notification in your Dashboard if this is the case. It should be easy to upgrade them; just click on the link that says “Upgrade automatically.”

Frequently:

1. Back up your database. I generally do this weekly, but if your webhost provides only weekly site backups and you have a very active site, you might prefer to do this daily or every other day.

The easiest way to back up your database is to install the WP-db-Backup plugin and set it to email you a copy at whatever frequency you choose. I then set my email program to automatically move the newest email into an archive folder. I keep the most recent one and delete the earlier versions.

Weekly:

1. Check your log files for 404 errors. These mean that someone tried to visit a page on your site, or perhaps look at an image, and couldn’t find it. If you’ve moved the page – say you published it in a category called “Art” and later changed it to “Architecture” so that the permalink changed – you can set up a redirect so that anyone trying to access the old page will be automatically whisked to the new one.

There’s a plugin for that, of course, and it’s called (oddly enough) Redirection.

If you want to just keep tabs on 404 errors, try JH 404 Logger .

2. Download a backup of your site files, which will include your theme – and more importantly – your uploaded images, videos, and other media. If you are short on disk space, just download the wp-content/themes/(name of theme you are using) and wp-content/uploads folders. Again, you need keep only the most recent copy and may delete or archive previous versions.

Once a month:

1. If you are on shared hosting and have a cap on your storage and bandwidth usage, you may want to keep tabs on your monthly usage. Some hosts will notify you when you reach 80% or more of your allotted bandwidth for the month, while others will just suspend without warning accounts that exceed their capacity. If you are consistently using most of your bandwidth each month, it might be time to consider upgrading to a more spacious account.

To check your bandwidth usage, you can go to your control panel — there is usually a link where you can check it. There is also a plugin that works with Google Analytics and can be set to show basic Analytics statistics right inside your WordPress Dashboard. This one is called Google Analytics for WordPress and has the potential to be very valuable if you need to keep track of a number of stats on your site.

There you are

Seven quick and easy tasks that will keep your installation of WordPress up to date, safe, and humming along. Happy blogging!

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