Blog maintenance - a Saturday morning activity
Since today is Saturday and i had nothing to do, i decided i should take care of my blog and prepare it for the oncoming Wordpress 2.3, scheduled to appear this Monday. In case you don’t know what goodies is it going to bring us, take a look here.
What does blog maintenance mean? Well, it’s a simple procedure that ensures you the blog is working smoothly, just as it did when you set it up, a long time ago 
Failing to do it periodically can leave your blog sluggish.
1. Lookout for new releases of the blogging engine and also check out for updates of the plugins you use. It’s always best to have the latest versions of everything.
2. Backup your site.
Because sometimes things might get wrong and you don’t want to loose all your hard work. I backup my database daily, using this automated Plugin, and my uploads folder once every week (or two, if i forget 
)
3. Delete Unused Templates and Plugins.
There’s no point on keeping things you don’t need on your server. But, if you think you might use these things again sometimes in the future, keep them on your hard-drive, just in case.
4. Check for dead/spam links
As people leave lots of comments on your blog, many of them might have links in it. That’s why you should check your site for Dead Links from time to time and eliminate those that don’t pass the test. This Alexa tool returns the first 50 dead links it finds on your page. This other dead links checker might come in handy too.
Also, check out you comments for spam, and don’t be afraid to cut them off if there’s anything suspicious. After all, we all hate spammers.
5. Run a spider simulator
It is important for you to know how accurate does a search engine bot see your blog, in order to get indexed properly. This tool here, a spider simulator, grades your site after a couple of criteria, based on a spiders ability to crawl your site. I got 20/24, how about you?
6. Check out your CSS/HTML validation
It’s known that having a valid CSS/HTML blog makes your pages easier to be interpreted by various browsers. That’s why, you should check these two things out from time to time, with the help of these tool: CSS validator and HTML validator.
7. Check out your Ads and Affiliates links work properly
Last but not least, if you’re monetising your blog, check out that every widget that should bring you money works smoothly.
That’s it. If you have other advices, don’t be shy and post them bellow.
Tags: blog, maintenance, wordpress
Thanks for the good info.
Hi Mike,
These are a usefull tools and info. Thank you.
Be blessed.
Thanks dudes
Sep 24th, 2007 at 11:00 am
[...] Don’t be too hasty in upgrading to Wordpress 2.3. First of all, take a look at this blog maintenance procedure, and once you’ve done it, check out that all the plugins you use are compatible with the new [...]
Nov 23rd, 2007 at 10:14 am
[...] Blog maintenance routine - Weekly routine that you should perform in order to be sure everything is fine with your blog. Backuping, several checks, all are explained in here. [...]