WordPress is one of the most popular and widely-used blogging platforms and CMSs (content management system). The reason is it’s easy to install and use, so you can focus on creating content rather than building and maintaining your website. Everything from small personal blogs to big digital magazines like Smashing use WordPress to run their sites. Chances are you’re using WordPress for your own site or are planning on using it. Well, although WordPress is fine out of the box, it’s not optimized – and worse, it can crash when you start getting more traffic. Lucky for you, this article brings you essential tips for maintaining and speeding up WordPress.

Using these simple and free tweaks and plugin installations, you can:

• Maintain your WordPress site to be in tip-top error-free shape using automated methods so you don’t need to waste your precious time

• Speed up your WordPress site so it not only loads faster but holds up to traffic spikes

• Monitor your WordPress site so you’re aware when a problem pops up and how to quickly fix it

All of which will ultimately free up your time to focus more on creating content and great work, not wasting time fixing your site when it goes down. So without further ado, here are the essential tips for maintaining and speeding up WordPress.

Maintaining Your WordPress Blog

1. Regularly backup your database

In case your WordPress-powered blog breaks or you need to reinstall WordPress. You’ll have all of your latest pages, posts and comments in a handy file. Automate this by using the WP-DBManager plugin. You can set it to regularly backup your database and save a file on your hosting or by emailing an attachment.

2. Optimize your database

Again, you can use the WP-DBManager plugin to automate this.

3. Regularly backup your WordPress files

This means your images and plugins. Automate this by using the WordPress Backup plugin. You can set it to regularly backup your WordPress files and email an attachment.

4. Reduce spam comments

Have Akismet plugin running and filtering out the spam comments. This will save you time by helping speed up comment moderation/reading/replying.

5. Make sure you don’t have unnecessary 404?s

This is when people try to access your pages and posts and get a 404 error message page instead. Use the 404 Notifier plugin to identify the 404 errors and fix them with redirection by using the Redirection plugin.

6. Switch to pretty permalinks

That is if you haven’t already. Go to Settings > Permalinks panel and choose a pretty permalink style (like “example.com/date/post-name/“). Like the URL style that Speckyboy here has, rather than the “/?p=X” permalink style that WordPress for some reason still insists on defaulting to. This not only helps with SEO (search engine optimization, since the keywords people would use to find your post will be right there in the URL) but with human readability. It becomes obvious what you’re going to read as well as making it easier to share.

7. Automate basic SEO (search engine optimization)

Install the All in One SEO Pack plugin. Add your title, keywords, and description in the plugin options screen. This will make it easier for people who are searching for what you have to find you.