Happy New Year to you all, it’s the time of year when people are embarking on New Year’s resolutions to change habits or accomplish new things.

I thought it might be a good time to give your blog a quick health check and get into some new year blog maintenance habits,  here is my list of blog resolutions you could make.

Keep Your Site Up To Date

Make it a priority to keep your WordPress code and plugin code up to date.  The updates that are released are for security, bug fix and additional functionality reasons, all of these are good things for your blog.

New Habit – Once a week check for update to plugins and WordPress, install them as required.  Please remember to back up first.

Get Rid Of Unused Plugins

There is a more than even chance that you have installed a plugin and are not using the functionality it provides.  Goto your dashboard and look through your list of plugins, find the ones you don’t recognise, don’t use, are not really that important, and delete them.  Plugins cause an overhead on your site’s performance

New Habit – Every few months audit your plugins and delete the ones you don’t use or need.

Tidy Your Database

This tidy up tip goes hand in hand with removing plugins.  You will find as you add and remove plugins additional tables and options are added to your database.  This can increase the size of your DB, in turn causing a performance overhead.

New Habit – review you database and remove any fields or tables you do not need.  WARNING this is an advanced topic, backup your database.

Tidy Your Categories

This is something often forgotten about, you create a new category, you add one blog post to it and never use that category again.  It’s time to reconcile for ease of navigating your site.

New Habit – review you categories, and remove any unnecessary ones, re-categorising your posts as you go.

Backup

Are you doing it enough, can you recover from a crash?  It doesn’t need much more than that, as a blogger you are only as good as your last backup.

New Habit – backup, go now, install plugins, backup, I mean it now, are you still here?

Tighten The Security

I see a lot of blogs that have been hacked, do yourself a favour

• change your default table prefix
• harden your passwords
• change your admin login name
• Apply security patches/updates as they appear
• obfuscate your WordPress version
• .. the list goes on, install the following plugin to see any known gaps you have. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-security-scan/

New habit – be ware that hackers target WordPress sites, they are a low hanging fruit because there are so many, keep your site secure.

Rounding It All Up

Give your blog the tech. equivalent of a new years detox ready for the coming years content. If you are not up to it book a health check at Dr WP Dude’s Colonic Flushing Clinic