My way of getting myself to do reality checks while awake tends to be by setting an intention to remember to check under specific circumstances/signs and also whenever anything particularly unusual happens, like a synchronicity and such other things. Even so, I actually have a universally poor time actively getting myself to do RCing whilst dreaming even when it's actively on my mind during a waking day; I kind of know why and I'm just saying this so you know the context of my experience.

I think if you've had some success with this before, then getting back into it shouldn't prove to be too much of an issue for you. Think about what did work about your previous experiences, and with regards to what didn't work, see those times as something that are unknowns right now, rather than as previous hard failures or anything like that. Sometimes things that didn't work before can then start working on fresh attempts. That said, if something like WILD really wasn't good at all for you because of messing with your sleep, then it's also totally fine to avoid it.

Although lucidity is rare for me, on average my lucid moments in dreams have gotten progressively longer, so I think that this will just generally improve as you journal both your lucid and non-lucid dreams. It might not be very noticeable in the short term unless you're getting to do a lot of practise work around it. There's still variation in the length of my lucidity, to be sure, but my very first lucid dreams were incredibly brief compared to most I have had more recently. Over the years I have felt myself to become more and more present in my non-lucid dreams, which is probably part of it for me too.