This is the fifth of a series of posts designed to discuss ways to monitor and improve your blog’s performance.

In addition to the website maintenance tips covered in the first four posts of this series, there are a few other things that can be done to help keep your site running smoothly. Here are a few other things I try to keep up on:

  • Update your WordPress Plugins – This obviously only applies to WordPress users, but that is who this series of posts is targeted for. Keeping your plugins up to date will help you to avoid security vulnerabilities, as well as help avoid problems when you upgrade to newer versions of WordPress. I try to do this monthly, but you should at a minimum do this everytime you upgrade to the next major version of WordPress (such as 2.2 or 2.3, etc.).
  • Get rid of things you don’t use – This is kind of broad, but in addition to removing code that isn’t being used, it can be beneficial to also remove old files that you aren’t using. This can include images that came with your theme that you have since removed, things you’ve uploaded to try out and didn’t stick with, or extra pages of code that aren’t being used. This probably won’t effect your site’s load time or anything like that, but it will help keep things more organized and running smoothly.
  • Check for bad links – Part of keeping your blog optimized for search engines is controlling your internal and outbound links. If you’ve changed your permalink structure, linked out to bad sites (pornography, gambling, etc.), or done outbound links to pages that have since been removed, this can have a negative effect on your search engine rankings. An easy way to find out what links are no longer valid is to go to Dead Links and have it spider your site. You can then go through and remove these links, or update them accordingly.
  • Use your Google Webmaster Tools – You should regularly check your Google Webmaster Tools to ensure that everything is set up the way you want. You can control how Google displays your site, validate your Robots.txt file, or submit your blog’s sitemap. Google will actually provide you all sorts of information about what their spider found when visiting your site, including HTTP errors, 404 errors, unreachable URL’s, and URL’s blocked by Robots.txt. This way you can remove old posts that are now unreachable for whatever reason, as well as verify your Robots.txt is blocking what you want it to and not additional stuff. You can also run a spider simulator if you want an idea of what your site looks like to the search engines.
  • Remove old scripts – Scripts often slow down your computer’s load time, so if you don’t use all those analytics services that you have scripts running for, you should probably remove them.

Anything else you do regularly to keep your website maintained?