Our WordPress maintenance checklist covers a list of essential things you should do religiously each month to ensure that your website runs smoothly across multiple devices. While this is a monthly list, you'll see better results if they can be performed weekly or even daily.

1. Perform a website speed audit to ensure it’s loading quickly: Page speed can affect SEO and user experience. GTMetrix, WP Checkup, and Google’s Page Insights are great tools that pinpoint where your slowness could be coming from. This could be large images, a heavy homepage with lots of elements, or even a slow hosting provider.

2. Monitor your website security daily: Security is such a major concern. Run a daily test to spotlight intrusions, file changes, and malware.

3. Review Google Analytics: The best way to know how well your site is doing and what’s working is by reviewing your Analytics data. 

4. Clear your trash: Old pages, posts, expired events and contests, obituaries, banner ads campaigns that have ended… all of this is simply taking up space and can cause your site to get slower over time.

5. Clean your media files: One of the main reasons you may run out of space on your hosting provider is because you have excess media that is no longer being used. These files add up over time.

6. Ensure images are optimized: Optimized images load faster and that helps with SEO and user experience. Ensure your authors know the value of the optimization process.

7. Check your navigation menus: Poor navigation is one of the frustrating spots for users. Check everything to ensure things are easy to find and hassle-free. Is anything missing? Be sure to check on desktop and mobile.

8. Check for broken links and missing pages: These can dramatically reduce your SEO. Do a search for “broken link checker” and enter your site for analysis.

9. Review your forms: Are contests easy to enter? Do the “contact us” and “advertise with us” forms work properly? Are those forms still going to the appropriate people?

10. Review the “Advertise with Us” page: Keeping this current and relevant is crucial because you don’t want to miss an advertising opportunity. How can it be better?

11. Check and delete spam comments: Ensure that spammers have not gotten through to comment on your website. Deleting all spam comments helps to keep your database clean and fast.

12. Reply to comments: If you have comments enabled, reply to them when necessary to improve user engagement.

13. Change your passwords: One of the most effective ways to prevent a malicious attack is to update your passwords often. And ensure they are strong passwords.

14. Remove inactive website admins: Ensure ex-employees are removed from the website admin. In the deletion process, it will ask if you want their posts to be attributed to a different author.

15. Review your site on multiple devices: Ensure things are still working the way someone would expect them to. If your site is experiencing an issue on a device you don’t use very often, it may take a long time to resolve and that could result in lost visitors.

While this list of for WordPress websites, the same can be true regardless of your content management system. Every website needs continuous maintenance to work properly.