WordPress Website Maintenance Checklist

Without a routine website maintenance plan, any site shows signs of age over time—like slower load times, misaligned elements, malfunctioning widgets, glitchy content updates, and even security breaches. An unmaintained site becomes hard to use, hard to find (as search rankings slip), and hard to save if it breaks.

You keep your physical spaces in good shape, remodeling and refurbishing where necessary, so do the same for your online space. Here are the maintenance musts for a healthy WordPress site.

Backing up your website means saving a duplicate version—site files (theme, plugins, etc.) and the database—to a secure location, much like uploading precious photos to Google Drive or saving a copy of your unpublished novel to Dropbox. Backing up your website on a regular basis protects your online business if (or when) something malfunctions, or your site goes down entirely.

Regular site backups are usually conducted by your web hosting provider, but if yours doesn’t, make sure you do. Websites can be backed up manually, or plugins can be installed that allow you to schedule automatic backups. WordPress has multiple plugins for this, both paid and free.

Sites should be backed up daily, weekly, or monthly, depending on how frequently content is updated on the site. If updates happen on a daily basis, site backups should too!

Like any other technology, WordPress is always evolving and improving with new features, code updates, bug fixes, and security patches. Run your site on the latest version of WordPress to take advantage of those new features, ensure compatibility with new plugins, and prevent your site from getting hacked.

To find out whether or not you are fully updated, go to Dashboard >> Updates. Be sure to back up your site (see above) before running an update, in case anything goes awry…and visit your site afterwards to check if anything did.

You can also choose to have WordPress run updates automatically by clicking the “Enable automatic updates for all new versions of WordPress” link. Security updates are automatic even without using the link. While automatic updates save time, you should still check in on your site regularly to ensure that all is well.

Updating themes and plugins is important for the same reasons as keeping up to date with the latest WordPress version. Outdated or unused themes and plugins pose a security risk and can slow things down, negatively affecting the user experience and SEO. Currently, 94 percent of WordPress security vulnerabilities come from plugins.

Run updates on themes and plugins as they become available (notifications appear in the Plugins menu) so those themes and plugins stay secure and function well. You can choose to have updates happen automatically, with the same caveats as above.

Again, remember to back up your site first, just in case.

Go through your themes, plugins, and widgets and get rid of any that are unused or unnecessary to prevent clogging up the machinery and letting in hackers.

While keeping your website up to date with the latest WordPress and component (theme and plugin) updates is an important part of preventing breaches, it never hurts to be proactive and add an additional layer of security. Anti-spam and security plugins identify and mitigate nuisances and threats ranging from spam to phishing to malicious attacks.

WordPress does a pretty good job of keeping website data in order, but over time the underlying database accumulates unneeded data like forgotten draft posts and content revisions, data from uninstalled plugins, deleted content, and spam comments. Surplus data buildup takes up space and can negatively affect loading speed.

Cleaning and optimizing the database can be done manually through phpMyAdmin or by using a popular plugin like WP-Optimize.

Regularly visit your website, imagining you are a customer. This helps you identify issues you might otherwise overlook. Check your site on different browsers and devices (including mobile) and confirm that pages load quickly and properly, menus are user-friendly, links take you to the right place, and plugins and widgets work correctly and add something valuable to your site.

Bonus: Have a friend or relative go through it for you. You already know how it’s supposed to work; they don’t. They may uncover things that are unintuitive to new visitors.

You should always check your website after any updates—new WordPress version updates, theme and plugin updates, and content updates—but it’s also a good habit to get into between those updates as well to catch any suspicious activity or things that break in the meantime.

Your booking engine should be a part of this check too. How easy is it to make a booking? Is all the right information there? Do you have pictures of the rooms?

Reviewing website statistics provides insight into how well your site does its job and is key to maintaining success. Performance metrics like site traffic, traffic sources, pageviews, bounce rates and, of course, conversion rates can pinpoint any anomalies that indicate whether content and design strategies need to be tweaked, as well as site health problems like slow load times or malfunctioning widgets.

Monitor website stats at least once a month. Google Analytics is a good place to start, and there are multiple plugins you can choose from to connect it to WordPress.

Your domain name is the name of your site; it’s what appears in your URL, for instance, worldwebtechnologies.com. You’ll need to renew this about once a year, unless you have it set on auto-renew. However, it’s still a good idea to log in and review your payment information. Credit cards expire…You don’t want your site to.

Your website is a crucial sales and marketing platform; keeping it in top shape is a must. Establishing and sticking to a routine maintenance plan enables it to work like a well-oiled machine for optimal success.

At World Web Technologies Inc., we offer an optional maintenance package with our design work. Our professionals take care of the tedious, technical side of maintenance, including WordPress and component (themes and plugins) updates and site security, to give you total peace of mind—and more time to focus on customers.

Contact us for more information.

Editor’s note: This post was last updated September 2024.