How to Perform WordPress Website Maintenance
It’s no surprise that we love WordPress. It’s what we work with for the grand majority of our projects and clients. The CMS offers uncountable benefits at a low cost but, you sacrifice much of the power of WordPress if you fail to update your site regularly. WordPress website maintenance can seem daunting at first, but we’re here to help!
WordPress website maintenance is the practice of monitoring, observing, updating, testing, and repairing the various components of your website on a regular basis.
Before we break down what maintenance steps you should be doing and how, let’s dive a little deeper into why we’re doing all this in the first place.
Why is WordPress Website Maintenance Important?
Owning a WordPress site is a lot like owning a car. You want a safe, smooth ride and if you want your car to last you a long time, you need to maintain it. Replenishing gas, changing the oil, getting new filters, washing the exterior, replacing worn tires – it’s all in service of keeping your car in tip-top shape. Maintaining a WordPress website is the same idea.
There are two main reasons for keeping your site updated: security and performance.
Security and Data Protection
If your site is out of date, it’s vulnerable. An out-of-date website can be the target of bots, hackers, and malware. To prevent malware infections or unintentional breaches, you need to be updating software to newer and safer versions regularly. An insecure website risks your users data, your own data, and can result in your site being taken down entirely.
You can prevent many of the most common online threats by keeping your site updated and taking regular backups.
Speed and Performance
The hygiene of a website affects the way it loads and performs. If your site is full of files and code that aren’t necessary, it can slow down load times. If your site has out of date plugins that don’t have the latest patches, certain functionalities can break. If you’re not updating core, themes, and plugins, these files can conflict with each other and cause crashes.
Maintaining the site involves not only preventing things that slow down your site, but performing tasks that can speed it up. This is all well worth your time. Research has shown that users will leave a site if it doesn’t load in less than 2 seconds, so it’s important that the experience is smooth and easy.
WordPress Website Maintenance Tasks
Just like with maintaining a car, each site is different. You care for a Ford truck differently than you’d care for a Maserati sports car. The type of website you run affects how you’d build a maintenance strategy.
We’ve compiled a list of 16 different tasks you should be performing if you want your site to operate at its best.
Only some of these are essential. If you omit these, you’re putting your site at serious risk.
Most are best practices; it’s a good idea to do them but you’re not taking an enormous risk by skipping them.
And finally we’ve included some as-needed tasks. These are things you may not need to do at all if your site doesn’t need them.
You may want to put your site in maintenance mode while doing updates. This will hide potentially broken pages in case something goes wrong, but it’s totally optional!
Essential Website Maintenance Tasks
If you do nothing else to support your website, you should be doing these three things. WordPress core, your plugins, and your themes are the pillars of code files that keep your website running. They work with the database (which we’ll discuss later) to display your site and edit content.
Core, plugin, and theme vulnerabilities account for the majority of site security issues.
The three most essential updates can all be found by going to Dashboard > Updates from the WordPress dashboard screen.
Update WordPress Core
The core WordPress software is what all WordPress sites have in common, regardless of how they look. It’s the dashboard, the edit post pages, the Media Library… all that stuff. A few times a year, a new WordPress core version becomes available. It can contain aesthetic UI changes as well as security and performance updates.
These are updates that all other software will build itself around. You should update as soon as a new version is available.
You’ll know your core software needs updating from the Updates page. Select the available update button and the update will run in the background.
Update Plugins
Plugins are packets of code that you can plug in or take out in order to add new functions to your site. Plugin developers work consistently to improve and repair plugins. So at various intervals, a developer may release a new update.
Updating your plugins prevents them from clashing with each other or your WordPress version. And they often include incredibly important security patches.
You can go to the Plugins page from the Dashboard to find and select the plugins that are highlighted in yellow. Choose Update, and you’re all done.
Update Themes
The reasoning for updating themes is similar to plugins. Your theme developer will occasionally release new updates. As soon as they become available, you should update to the newest version. This way you minimize the risk of things breaking, conflicting, or housing potentially dangerous code vulnerabilities.
You can see that a theme needs to be updated by going to the Updates or Themes page from your dashboard. If you see that one theme comes up or is highlighted, follow the prompt to update it.
Now that you know the essentials of WordPress website maintenance, let’s look at the other important tasks. Before updating themes and plugins you should be taking backups. So that’s first on the list!
Best Practice WordPress Website Maintenance Tasks
Take Backups
Taking a backup consists of making and downloading a copy of your website files and database that you can store and potentially use later. It’s like how you may keep hard copies of physical documents on hand, just in case.
If your site does break, crash, or fall victim to a hack, having backups can save the day. You can usually use the same tool you used for the backup to restore the site to an earlier version. Replacing the current compromised files with clean old ones.
You can use a variety of tools and services to take backups. Most sites benefit from monthly backups, but you can take them more frequently depending on your site needs.
Check Uptime and Performance
Use your website hosting tools or external ones to evaluate your site’s performance. Most tools will tell you things like how often your site goes down, if at all, how much bandwidth it uses, how fast it loads, etc.
Gaining a baseline understanding of this information means you can notice when something is off. If you recognize a dip in performance, you’re ahead of the game when it comes to figuring out why.
Monitor for Security
Use plugins or third party tools to keep a close eye on your site. These tools can evaluate your code to find – and hopefully prevent – malware, bots, hacks, and other attacks. Monitoring as a part of your ongoing maintenance means that you can catch issues early. When you catch them early, there is less of an effect on the user experience.
Check Site Page Previews
When you share your webpages on social media or other sites, a preview will appear. You know the ones. There’s usually an image, title, and description. It’s important to check how your pages look when shared. Are they missing an image? Is the title what you want it to be? Spend some time using testing tools – we like Social Share Preview – to examine what your shared pages look like, then remediate them if necessary.
Remove What You Don’t Need
This is a very often overlooked step. On a regular basis, go through your Dashboard and delete stuff! But only things you don’t need. Remove plugins you don’t use, themes you don’t use, pages and posts that are sitting in trash or drafts, and images that might be unused or duplicates.
All these things sitting on your server just add more files. More files can mean slower load times and even potentially more opportunities for vulnerabilities. Your site should only ever include the files you need and nothing you don’t.
Check for Mixed Content
The SSL certificate on your website encrypts all the data sent from your server to the browser. It basically adds a layer of security onto every file. Sometimes, a file or two gets missed. An image URL, for example, might end up without SSL encryption. Usually, this means that the image won’t be shown. Or it could mean that your site gets flagged for not being secure.
Use a plugin to search for mixed content. Ones that find them can resolve them by re-applying the SSL certificate.
Optimize the Database
We’ve been talking a lot about files. But you should also be optimizing the WordPress database. Clean it up regularly by deleting any unnecessary data. This could include post revisions, spam comments, or unused plugin files.
There are plugins out there that automate the process for you. When the database is optimized, performance is boosted and query speed and fragmentation are reduced.
Find and Repair Broken Links
The internet is an ever-changing thing. When you link out to pages on the web – in your posts or pages – you run the risk of eventually ending up with broken links. This happens when a website is moved or deleted. Someone clicks on the link and they aren’t sent to the page they expected.
Use a tool to find broken links and repair them. Either remove the link altogether or find a new link to replace it. Broken links can really hurt someone’s experience on your website, but it’s a pretty quick problem to fix.
Check Your Site for Mobile Views
The majority of people conduct most of their website surfing on mobile devices. That means your site should always look good and work well on those devices.
Once a month, open up your phone and navigate your site. Ask a friend who has a different iOS to do the same. Find anything that is broken or difficult to use, and repair it for the smaller screen view.
Report on Website Analytics and SEO Metrics
If improving things like page rank and website traffic is important to you, make reporting a part of your maintenance process. Use free or paid third party tools to collect the information that matters to you. This could include how many sites visits certain pages get, how many downloads or sales there have been, where your keywords are ranking, etc.
Use tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or SEMrush to collect this information.
You can quickly see your status; where you’re doing well and where you could stand to improve. If you review this data regularly over time, you start to see trends and patterns. That information is gold when you create performance and marketing strategies and campaigns.
At Web Pro Geeks, we use ManageWP for our backups, monitoring, and more. We highly recommend it!
Site-specific Maintenance Tasks
Every website is different. Especially when it comes to WordPress. Depending on the type of site, its purpose, and its customization, there are specific things you should include in your WordPress website maintenance checklist. These are good steps for ecommerce sites, custom sites, WordPress multisites, etc.
Audit User Accounts and Test Functions
If your site allows or requires people to log in or create user accounts
On a regular basis you should:
- Review the user account profiles
- Remove any duplicates
- Remove old ones
- Look for bot or spam profiles
- Test the login page
- Test the UI from the user’s perspective
Test Your Forms
If you have contact or submission forms on your site
On a regular basis you should:
- Fill out every form on the site from a logged out browser
- Fill out the form incorrectly to make sure error messages show
- Determine that after submission, the user is sent to the right place or shown the right message
- Ensure that the form notifications go to the right admin
- Ensure that any form submission confirmation emails function correctly
Test Your E-commerce Shop
If your site has any kind of e-commerce functionality
On a regular basis you should:
- Test the shop function for each type of product (physical, virtual, variable, etc.)
- Test emails, notifications, and confirmation emails
- Update inventory/stock
- Test the payment systems and error messages
- Test to make sure refund systems work
Test Custom Functions and Code
If your site has any custom-built code attached to it
On a regular basis you should:
- Test it!
- Find failures and conflicts
- Bring in a developer, if necessary, to clean up or update code
Frequently Asked WordPress Website Maintenance Questions
With all you now know, you may still have some questions about WordPress website maintenance. Here are a few of the most commonly asked questions we get about this process.
Leave your question in the comments section and it could be added to this list!
Q: Should I perform WordPress website maintenance myself?
You absolutely can! If you’re the website manager or primary owner of the site, doing maintenance yourself means you always know the health and history of your site. However, it’s extremely common to have someone else perform maintenance and report back to you.
Q: How often should I perform website maintenance?
Depending on your website, this frequency changes. In most cases, monthly maintenance is a good idea. However, if your site gets a lot of traffic, processes many sales per day, or has content edits very frequently it’s a good idea to consider weekly maintenance tasks.
Q: Should I pay for another service or tool to do maintenance for me?
Many companies offer on-going website maintenance as a service. By working with a company, you can save yourself time and trust that an experienced team is managing your site. Some tools can be good investments, especially if you have many sites to perform maintenance for on a regular basis.
Maintaining your WordPress website is well within your grasp, but we wanted to give you an extra hand. Download a copy of our WordPress website maintenance checklist. Use this document to keep track of tasks, dates, status, and who’s doing what!
