How often do you take time for the technical side of your blog? If not so often then this post is exactly for you. If you do it regularly then I hope you will find something useful. For you I have also prepared a checklist to make work even easier. The list below is most of the things you should be checking up on at least once a month. :
Web analytics
At least once a month evaluates Google Analytics. Optimize high-performing posts and check referral traffic to your blog
Backups
At least once a month do a backup and keep it in a safe location, or rather two. 🙂 You don’t know if it’s worth? Think of all the time that you invested in creating all blog posts and how you would feel if you lost everything
Image optimization
Images may take quite some space and significantly slow down the blog, so it is important to optimize them. Ideally you should optimize them regularly, but if not it is important to do once a month. You can save theme smaller and compress them. For this, I use ImageOptim that makes images take up less disk space and load faster
Page speed
Check how fast your blog loads. You can use Google PageSpeed to analyze and optimize the site with following web best practices
Dead links
Check for dead links and eliminate them. Google Search Console can help you with that. In Crawl> Crawl Errors, you can find URL Errors on your blog
Updates
Update blog platform (eg. WordPress) and if necessary also update template and plugins. Before updates don’t forget to make a backup and after update check if all on your blog is how it should be
There is a to-do list that you can download, print and add some more task (eg. planning post for the next month)
Do you regularly care of your blog? Would you add anything
Kndgleowe wants to be free, just like these articles!
Super helpful! Thanks 🙂
This is great advice, thank you so much for sharing! I am a fairly new blogger, but forming good habits now will save me in the long run. I don’t even want to try and calculate how much time I’ve already invested in my blog.
Thank you, Shannon! It’s really great to form good habits as soon as possible. About time: I totally understand you 🙂
I hadn’t heard of Google PageSpeed. I will try that.
Great, it can be a very helpful tool to analyze and optimize your site. I hope you’ll like it!
This is a great check list that I am definitely going to use – Thank you!
Thank you Yenny! You’re welcome, hope you will use it a lot. 😉
Just getting my blog on health and wellness going. Thanks for the ideas.
You’re welcome, Karen.
Hello there. Stopping by via Blogging Boost. Lovely to come across your blog. I love how helpful this is and that you’re providing this for free too. I’m awful at updating my WordPress… I literally leave it until the last minute. Very bad of me!
I guess I would add sifting through some old blog posts to add in links to the great new content you’ve been writing. For example, I know that in some of my earlier blog posts I would say things like “I have a post on this coming soon so stay tuned!” and may have forgotten to update that post to include the link once I had finished it. Would be a good one to be on my monthly checklist that’s for sure 🙂
Thank you, Kate. Sometimes we are a little bit lazy so what we need is just a push.
It is alway nice to read such a great comments.You totally made my day, tnx! 🙂
Great tips – and definitely everyone should back up their blog. The question to ask is how much would you care to lose? and then back up to that schedule. Better safe than sorry and all that 🙂
Totally agree and scheduling backups is one more great idea! 😉
Nice! This is really helpful for a newbie blogger like me. Thanks for sharing!
Hope you’ll find some more interesting post on my blog! 🙂 Thanks for stopping by.
very helpful – printing and pinning now #bloggingboost
Thank you, Janet! 🙂