Welcome to this lesson on Site Maintenance.
Admin Tools includes several tools that help keep your Joomla website running smoothly.
Although you can run many of these tasks manually, it's much more convenient to let Admin Tools perform them automatically in the background.
To configure this, open Tools and select Site Maintenance.
This opens the Admin Tools plugin, where you can choose which maintenance tasks should run automatically.
The first option is the Rescue URL.
We've already covered that feature in the lesson on unblocking yourself, so we won't look at it again here.
As you move through the settings, remember that every option includes built-in help.
Simply hover over the title to see a brief explanation of what it does.
The first maintenance task is the Session Optimiser.
This periodically optimises Joomla's session table to help keep it running efficiently.
Enable the feature and leave the default interval of sixty minutes unless you have a specific reason to change it.
In short, this simply helps keep your session database performing well.
Next is the Session Cleaner.
This removes expired sessions that Joomla no longer needs.
It's a simple housekeeping task that helps keep your database tidy.
I also recommend enabling the Cache Cleaner and Cache Auto-expiration.
These work together to remove old cache files automatically.
This helps prevent unnecessary files building up over time and ensures Joomla isn't serving stale cached content.
Another useful option is the Temporary Directory Cleaner.
When Joomla installs extensions, temporary files are created.
Normally they're removed automatically, but occasionally files are left behind.
Enabling this option ensures your temporary directory is cleaned up automatically, saving you from having to do it yourself.
The next section deals with inactive user accounts.
By default, no accounts are deleted automatically.
However, if your site allows public registration, you may find that people register but never activate their account, or activate it and never actually use it.
Admin Tools can automatically remove those unused accounts after a period of time that you choose.
For example, you might decide to delete accounts that have never been activated after seven days.
Whether you enable this depends on how your website manages user registrations.
The final maintenance option controls the size of the Security Exceptions Log.
A value of zero disables automatic cleanup, meaning every security exception is kept.
That's fine for most websites.
If your log becomes very large, you can enter the maximum number of entries you want to retain.
For example, entering 100 means that only the most recent one hundred security exceptions will be kept.
Once you've configured the options you want to use, make sure the plugin itself is enabled.
Click Save & Close, then close the browser tab.
From now on, Admin Tools will perform these maintenance tasks automatically, keeping your Joomla website clean, organised and running efficiently without any further intervention from you.