Having a website is no longer just an option for businesses—it’s a necessity. When it comes to building and managing websites, WordPress is one of the most popular platform of choice for millions. Its user-friendly interface, versatility, and extensive ecosystem of themes and plugins have made it a preferred choice for business websites of all types.
If your business website is based on WordPress, it’s vital to understand that WordPress needs ongoing maintenance. Just like a car needs routine servicing to run smoothly, your WordPress site requires regular care to operate at peak efficiency. Without it, you risk sluggish load times, security vulnerabilities, and a compromised user experience—all of which can significantly impact your bottom line.
To ensure your site performs well and gets the best results for your business, regular WordPress website maintenance is the key. This is something that can often be neglected, but is absolutely crucial to your site.
In this post we’ll explore the how regular upkeep affects everything from your site’s speed and security to its search engine rankings and user satisfaction. If you’ve got the time and right people in your business, this is something you can do internally. If that’s not practical, then using a professional WordPress maintenance service like our website care plans is a worthwhile investment.
What is WordPress website maintenance?
WordPress maintenance is the ongoing process of caring for and optimising your WordPress website to ensure it remains secure, fast, and functional. It’s not a one-time task, but rather a series of regular activities that keep your site in top shape.
But what exactly does WordPress maintenance entail? Let’s break down the key components:
WordPress core, plugin & theme Updates
This is perhaps the most critical aspect of maintenance. WordPress itself, along with themes and plugins, frequently release updates. These updates often include security patches, bug fixes, and new features. Keeping everything up-to-date ensures your site benefits from the latest improvements and remains protected against known vulnerabilities.
Security monitoring, audits and hardening
Beyond updates, security maintenance involves regular malware scans, checking for vulnerabilities, managing users, and monitoring for suspicious activity.
Performance monitoring & optimisation
This involves fine-tuning your website to ensure it loads quickly and runs smoothly. Activities could might include optimising images, minifying CSS and JavaScript, leveraging caching, and cleaning up your database.
Content & SEO audits and management
While often overlooked, keeping your content fresh and relevant is a crucial part of maintenance. Regularly updating and adding new content for your website is good for users, and great for getting found in search engines. It also involved updating outdated information, fixing broken links, and ensuring all media files are working correctly.
Regular website backups
Regular backups are your safety net. If something goes wrong – whether due to a failed update, a security breach, or human error – having recent backups allows you to restore your site quickly and minimise any downtime.
Monitoring uptime, user experience & errors
Consistently checking your site’s performance, uptime, and user experience helps you catch and address issues before they become major problems.
By addressing each of these areas regularly, you create a comprehensive maintenance routine that keeps your WordPress site running like a well-oiled machine. It’s not just about fixing problems as they arise; it’s about proactively preventing issues and continuously improving your site’s performance.
In the next section, we’ll delve into how each of these maintenance activities directly impacts your site’s performance, and why neglecting them can lead to serious consequences for your online presence.
Regular plugin, theme & core updates are essential
A critical component of WordPress maintenance is keeping your site’s core software, themes, and plugins up to date. These updates are not just about accessing new features; they play a crucial role in your site’s security, performance, and compatibility.
WordPress core updates
WordPress core updates are the foundation of a well-maintained site. The WordPress team regularly releases updates that patch security vulnerabilities, fix bugs, improve performance, and sometimes add new features. Staying current with core updates ensures your site benefits from the latest security measures and performance improvements.
Theme updates
Theme updates are equally important. Many WordPress users stick with their current theme version, fearing that an update might break their site’s design. However, theme updates often include important security patches, compatibility improvements with the latest WordPress core, and performance enhancements. Regular theme updates can improve your site’s speed, security, and functionality.
Plugin updates
Plugin updates are perhaps the most frequent and can have the most immediate impact on your site’s functionality. WordPress’s extensive plugin ecosystem is one of its greatest strengths, but it also introduces potential vulnerabilities if not maintained properly. Plugin developers regularly release updates to fix security issues, improve performance, add new features, and ensure compatibility with the latest WordPress core and other popular plugins.
Risks of neglecting updates
Neglecting these updates can lead to several issues. Outdated software is the main attack vectors for hackers. By not updating, you’re leaving known vulnerabilities unpatched, essentially leaving your site’s door open to potential intruders. Additionally, as WordPress core, themes, and plugins evolve, compatibility issues can arise. An outdated plugin might not work correctly with a new WordPress version, potentially breaking functionality on your site.
Best practices for updating
Updating isn’t as simple as clicking the update button for everything as soon as an update is available. A strategic approach to updates is crucial. Here are some best practices:
• Always backup your site before performing any updates.
• Test major updates in a staging environment first.
• Update one component at a time
• After updating, thoroughly test your site’s functionality
Maintaining a regular update schedule is key. Set aside time at least once a month at a minimum to review available updates, apply them in a controlled manner, and test your site. If you have a website care plan with us, we run updates on a weekly schedule (and often same or next day for vulnerabilities) This proactive approach ensures your site remains secure and performs optimally.
Remember, WordPress maintenance is not a one-time task but an ongoing process. When your plugins, themes or WordPress isn’t updated for months at a time, you increase the chances of something going seriously wrong with your website that could be costly.
Keep your site secure with regular maintenance
When it comes to WordPress maintenance, security should be at the forefront of every website owner’s mind. As the most popular content management system on the web, WordPress is an attractive target for hackers and malicious bots. Regular security maintenance is not just about protecting your data; it’s about preserving your site’s integrity, your brand’s reputation, and your users’ trust.
We’ve covered the importance of keeping your WordPress core, plugins and themes up to date, but where else does regular maintenance factor into keeping your site secure?
Regular security audits / malware scans
Regular security and malware scans are a crucial part of WordPress maintenance. These scans can detect malware, suspicious code, and potential vulnerabilities in your site’s files and database. There are many security plugins that offer automated scanning features, alerting you to potential threats before they can cause significant damage. Some hosting providers have built in malware scanning and monitoring running, which is a great option and might mean a plugin isn’t required (or in some cases even recommended). As well as regular scans, it’s also important to audit the run WordPress security audits of your site look for weak points.
Vulnerability monitoring
Vulnerability monitoring is another crucial aspect of WordPress security maintenance. It involves actively tracking and assessing potential weaknesses in your WordPress core, themes, and plugins that could be exploited by attackers. Tools and services exist that can automatically scan your WordPress installation, comparing your active themes and plugins against databases of known vulnerabilities. These tools often provide real-time alerts when a vulnerability is discovered in any of your site’s components, allowing you to take swift action – whether that’s applying a patch, updating the vulnerable component, or temporarily disabling it until a fix is available. Regular vulnerability monitoring helps you stay one step ahead of potential security threats, enabling a proactive rather than reactive approach to your WordPress site’s security.
Hardening WordPress security
Hardening your WordPress installation is an ongoing process in security maintenance. This includes measures such as limiting login attempts to prevent brute-force attacks, implementing two-factor authentication and using strong, unique passwords for all user accounts. Regular reviews of user roles and permissions are also crucial, ensuring that each user only has the access level they need.
Firewall implementation is another critical security measure. A web application firewall (WAF) can block malicious traffic before it reaches your site, protecting against common attack vectors like SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS). Many WordPress security plugins include WAF functionality, making it easier to implement this crucial layer of protection.
Reducing spam
While not strictly security, spam management is a another important aspect of WordPress maintenance, protecting your site from unwanted and potentially harmful content. Spam typically appears as unwanted comments on posts or submissions through contact forms. While WordPress offers basic tools like comment moderation, additional measures are often necessary. Anti-spam plugins can automatically filter out spam using advanced algorithms. CAPTCHA systems like Google reCAPTCHA can help deter bots and reduce spam. For contact forms, honeypot fields can trick bots without impacting user experience. Regularly monitoring and identifying sources of spam will help your site stay in good shape.
Other security considerations
Regular backups are a often-overlooked aspect of security maintenance. While backups don’t prevent attacks, they are your last line of defence if a security breach does occur. Maintaining frequent, comprehensive backups of your site allows you to quickly restore to a clean version if your site is compromised. It’s important to store these backups securely, ideally in a location separate from your main hosting.
SSL certificate management is another crucial element of WordPress security maintenance. Ensuring your site uses HTTPS not only protects data in transit but also builds trust with your users and can positively impact your search engine rankings. Regular checks to ensure your SSL certificate is up to date and properly configured should be part of your maintenance routine.
Monitoring your site’s traffic and user activities can help you spot potential security issues early. Unusual spikes in traffic, multiple failed login attempts, or unexpected changes to your site’s files can all be indicators of a security problem. Implementing logging and regularly reviewing these logs can provide valuable insights into your site’s security status.
The impact of maintenance on site performance
In the website world, speed is king. Users expect websites to load almost instantly, and search engines like Google prioritise faster sites in their rankings. Regular WordPress maintenance plays a crucial role in improving and maintaining your site’s speed and load times.
Image optimisation
One of the most impactful maintenance tasks for improving speed is image optimisation. Large, uncompressed images are often the biggest culprits in slow page loads. Regular maintenance should include compressing existing images without losing quality, implementing lazy loading, and ensuring new images are sized appropriately and well. This simple yet effective practice can significantly reduce page load times.
Improve load time with caching, CDN, and minification
Another key aspect of speed-focused maintenance is minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTML. This process removes unnecessary characters from your code without changing its functionality, reducing file sizes and improving load times. Similarly, leveraging browser and page caching can dramatically reduce load times for visitors.
Database optimisation
Other site performance optimisations that should be considered is running regular database optimisation. This isn’t something that is visible to users, but they play a huge role in your site’s overall speed and performance. WordPress is highly database driven, and monitoring and optimising your database keeps your site running smoothly and loading quickly.
Importance of performance monitoring
Optimisation however is only half the battle. To truly maintain and improve your site’s speed, you need to implement a consistent monitoring strategy. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GT Metrix, and Pingdom are invaluable for this purpose. They provide comprehensive reports on performance including page load time, total page size, number of requests, and specific recommendations for improvement. Regularly checking your speed and performance with these tools can help you identify new speed issues as they arise and track the impact of your optimisation efforts over time.
This cycle of testing, analysing, implementing, and re-testing should be repeated regularly as part of your maintenance routine. As your site grows and changes, new speed issues can arise, and staying on top of these through regular maintenance ensures your site continues to perform at its best.
By making speed optimisation and monitoring a key part of your WordPress maintenance routine, you’re not just improving your site’s performance – you’re enhancing user experience, boosting your search engine rankings, and ultimately supporting the success of your online presence.
Keeping your WordPress Site’s content fresh
Content management is an often overlooked but crucial aspect of WordPress maintenance. While it’s easy to focus on technical aspects like updates and security, the content of your site plays a vital role in its success and effectiveness. Regular content maintenance not only keeps your site relevant for users but also significantly impacts your search engine visibility.
Regularly audit content for outdated information
At its core, content management involves regularly keeping your website’s information up-to-date and accurate. This means regularly reviewing your existing pages and posts to ensure the information they contain is still current and valuable. Outdated content can mislead your visitors and damage your credibility. For instance, if you’re a business, you’ll want to make sure your product information, pricing, and contact details are always accurate.
Content freshness matters
Another key aspect of content management is the addition of new, relevant content. Search engines favour websites that regularly publish fresh content, as it signals that the site is active and potentially more valuable to users. This doesn’t mean you need to publish daily, but maintaining a consistent schedule of new content can boost your search engine rankings and keep your audience engaged.
On-site SEO improvements
On-site SEO improvements should also be part of your regular WordPress website maintenance routine, as these directly impact your site’s visibility and performance in search engine results. The main areas to focus on here are:
- Fix broken links and 404 errors: Use redirects to guide users to the right pages.
- Optimise content: Use relevant keywords naturally and make your content easy to read.
- Improve meta information: Write clear, engaging title tags and meta descriptions for better click-through rates.
- Manage duplicate content: Use canonical tags to tell search engines which version of a page is the main one.
- Organize site structure: Create a logical hierarchy with clear URLs and smart internal linking.
- Conduct regular SEO audits: This helps you spot and fix issues before they harm your rankings.
By regularly working on these areas, you can improve both your search engine rankings and user experience. Remember, good SEO is an ongoing process, not a one-time fix. It’s also important to note these on-site SEO improvements are only one side of improving visibility, you also need to consider off-site SEO.
Website backups are your safety net
Backups are a critical component of WordPress maintenance, serving as your last line of defence against data loss. Regular backups ensure that even if the worst happens – whether it’s a hacking attempt, a failed update, or a server crash – you can quickly restore your site to a working state.
What should be backed up
A comprehensive backup strategy should include both your WordPress files and your database. Your files contain all your themes, plugins, uploads, and other site content, while your database stores all your posts, pages, comments, and settings. Both are crucial for a full site restoration.
Backup frequency & location
The frequency of backups depends on how often your site changes. For frequently updated sites, daily backups might be necessary. For less active sites, weekly backups might suffice. Many WordPress hosting providers offer automated backup solutions, but it’s wise to have your own backup system in place as well, preferably in a different location to your hosting.
It’s not enough to just create backups; you need to ensure they’re stored securely. Best practice is to store backups in multiple locations: on your server, on your local computer, and in a cloud storage service. This redundancy protects you from data loss even if one storage location fails.
Test your backups
Lastly, you should test your backups by performing a restore on a staging site. This ensures your backup process is working correctly and familiarises you with the restoration process, which can be invaluable during a high-stress situation when you need to quickly bring your site back online.
Monitoring uptime and issues
Monitoring is a crucial aspect of WordPress maintenance that often goes understated. It involves consistently checking your site’s performance, uptime, and user experience. This proactive approach allows you to catch and address issues before they escalate into major problems that could impact your site’s functionality or user satisfaction.
We’ve covered performance monitoring above, but it’s also important to think about uptime monitoring and user experience monitoring.
Uptime monitoring
Uptime monitoring ensures that your site is always accessible to your visitors. Downtime can occur for various reasons, from server issues to plugin conflicts. Using uptime monitoring services can alert you immediately if your site goes down, allowing you to address the issue promptly. This is particularly crucial for e-commerce sites or any business where website availability directly impacts revenue.
User experience monitoring
User experience monitoring involves keeping an eye on how visitors interact with your site. This can include tracking metrics like bounce rate, time on site, and conversion rates. Tools like Google Analytics provide valuable insights into user behaviour. Regular monitoring of these metrics can help you identify pages or features that aren’t performing well, allowing you to make data-driven decisions to improve your site.
By incorporating regular monitoring into your WordPress maintenance routine, you create a feedback loop that continually informs your maintenance efforts. This proactive approach not only helps prevent major issues but also ensures that your site is constantly evolving to meet the needs of your users and the goals of your business.
Monitoring errors & 404s
Error monitoring, particularly tracking 404 (Not Found) errors, is a crucial aspect of WordPress maintenance that can often goes overlooked. 404 errors occur when a user or search engine tries to access a page that doesn’t exist on your site, which can happen due to mistyped URLs, deleted pages, or broken links. Regular monitoring of these errors provides valuable insights into user behaviour and potential issues with your site’s structure or content.
Many WordPress plugins and services can automatically log and report 404 errors, allowing you to identify patterns and address problems promptly. For instance, if you notice numerous 404 errors for a particular URL, it might indicate a broken link that needs fixing or a popular page that was accidentally removed. By setting up redirects for common 404 errors, you can improve user experience and preserve SEO value.
Additionally, monitoring other types of errors, such as PHP errors or database connection issues, can help you catch and resolve potential problems before they impact your site’s functionality or user experience. Implementing a comprehensive error monitoring strategy ensures that your WordPress site remains healthy, user-friendly, and optimised for both visitors and search engines.
Maintenance schedules for a WordPress website
Creating a regular maintenance schedule is crucial for systematically managing your WordPress site’s upkeep tasks. A well-planned schedule ensures that all aspects of your site receive regular attention, preventing small issues from escalating into major problems.
Here’s what a maintenance schedule could look like:
Daily / Automated
- Daily Backups: Done either via the hosting platform, or through a backup plugin.
- Security Scans: Conduct regular security scans to detect and address potential vulnerabilities.
- Uptime Monitoring: Continuously monitor your site’s availability to quickly address any downtime issues.
Weekly
- WordPress Core Updates: Run any available core updates to ensure your site benefits from the latest features, performance improvements, and security patches.
- Plugin and Theme Updates: Update your plugins and themes to maintain compatibility and security.
- Regular Backups: Check backups are running successfully, ideally with a regular backup in a separate location to your hosting.
- Security Scans: Conduct regular security scans to detect and address potential vulnerabilities.
- Error Monitoring: Monitor server, database, and hosting errors, and investigate and troubleshoot wherever necessary.
Monthly
- Database Optimisation: Check the databases and perform routine database cleanups to improve performance and reduce bloat.
- Spam Blocking and Management: Check for spam issues and frequency, and strengthen spam protection measures as needed.
- Caching Management: Regularly review and update your caching configuration to ensure optimal performance.
- Analytics Review: Regularly check your Google Analytics and Google Search Console data to inform your content and SEO strategies.
The frequency and priority of these tasks can vary based on your site’s needs, but with any site the key is consistency and adapting your schedule as your site grows and evolves.
Leveraging automation
While creating a maintenance schedule is crucial, manually performing every task can be time-consuming. This is where automation comes in, allowing you to ensure consistency while freeing up your time for more strategic tasks.
Many aspects of WordPress maintenance can be automated. While this can be a good option, it’s important to maintain human oversight. Regularly review the results of your automated tasks and be prepared to step in when necessary. For instance, while you might automate plugin updates, you should still manually check your site after updates to ensure everything is functioning correctly.
In conclusion
In conclusion, regular WordPress maintenance is not just a good practice—it’s essential for the health, security, and success of your website. Each aspect of maintenance plays a crucial role in ensuring your WordPress site continues to serve your business effectively.
DIY maintenance can be a great option if you have internal staff with the technical knowledge that can dedicate regular time to these tasks. However, staying on top of updates, security threats, performance optimisations, and content management can quickly become overwhelming, especially as your site grows.
Many business owners and managers are already short on time, so it can often be difficult to maintain your site effectively. This is where professional WordPress maintenance services, like our website care plans, can do the hard work for you, so you can focus on where you add the most value to your business.
Whether you choose to maintain your WordPress site yourself or opt for a professional service, the key is consistency. Regular, thorough maintenance is the foundation that will keep your site healthy, up to date, and working towards your business goals.
Your website is often the first point of contact between your business and potential customers. By keeping it well-maintained, you’re not just caring for a digital asset—you’re investing in the growth and success of your business.
