Few content management systems offer as much power and versatility as WordPress, but this flexibility requires oversight. Take your hands off the reins for too long, and your site’s performance may suffer. Worse still, you risk opening yourself up to security vulnerabilities that could have expensive repercussions, both for your sales and reputation.
Don’t worry if all this sounds like a lot of work, though, because there are plenty of tools you can use to simplify everything. Follow our handy checklist of WordPress website maintenance tips, and your site will continue to run like a well-oiled machine.
Daily Maintenance Tasks
You should complete certain WordPress maintenance tasks daily to ensure a secure and reliable website. Fortunately, these chores only take a few minutes.
Monitor Website Security
WordPress powers nearly half of all websites, making it a major target for hacks and exploits. You can mitigate this risk by following best practices when building your site. However, you still need to apply a few additional security measures and ensure they’re working as intended.
Key things to check each day include:
- Failed login attempts.
- Brute force attempts.
- Unusual IP addresses.
- Changes in user roles and settings.
- Changes to plugin and theme settings.
- Sudden drops in website performance.
- Unexpected changes to key files, such as .htaccess or wp-config.php.
While you can track some of these things manually, the easiest way to take care of everything is to install a security plugin such as Wordfence or Sucuri. In addition to monitoring login attempts, traffic, and file changes, the best security plugins also offer security hardening, firewalls, and real-time alerts. These features help actively prevent attacks, making WordPress maintenance a breeze.
Learn more about WordPress security here.
Ensure Backups Are Running Successfully
A lot can happen in a day, especially if you’re optimizing lots of content or tweaking your site’s design. Make backup confirmation one of your daily WordPress tasks, however, and you can avoid downtime or loss of work if something unexpected happens. Whether you’re dealing with server failures, hacks, or plugin conflicts, backups allow you to roll your site back to the last time things worked properly.
So, what makes a good WordPress backup? You’ll generally want copies of the following:
- Database: Contains your posts, comments, users, and settings
- Core Files: Includes all essential files your site needs to function
- Themes and Plugins: Provide your site’s appearance and function
- Uploaded Files: Includes all images, videos, and other uploads
Each day, whether you prefer to backup manually or use a plugin, check the backup logs to confirm everything is working correctly. If you choose to go the plugin route, I recommend having backups at the server level in case you can’t access the WP admin. You should also occasionally test backups to ensure restoration works.
Don’t rely on your server to house all your backups, either. If it fails, it could take your site and all those backups with it. Always keep additional copies offsite on a cloud storage platform such as Google Drive or OneDrive.
Weekly Maintenance Tasks
Weekly tasks within our WordPress maintenance checklist focus on ensuring things work correctly. This is when you’ll check your plugins and monitor your site’s health.
Update Plugins and Themes
Checking for plugin and theme updates is an integral part of regular WordPress maintenance. Security and search engine optimization (SEO) plugins, in particular, often update every few weeks, so you could miss new functionality or leave your site vulnerable to hackers if you don’t keep on top of these updates.
To check for and apply updates:
- Create a database and file backup.
- Access Updates under Dashboard in the left WordPress menu.
- Check the WordPress version number and click the update button if present.
- Scroll down to plugins and check the ones you want to update.
- Scroll down to themes and do the same.
- Verify that everything still works correctly.
It’s often better to first update everything within a staging site — a non-live duplicate of your site — before making any live changes. This way, you can verify things work correctly.
Themes, specifically, sometimes lose customizations after updates. The best way to avoid this is to create a child theme to house your customizations. It will preserve your customizations while still inheriting updated functionality from the parent theme.
Run Security and Malware Scans
Security scans aren’t the most exciting of WordPress website maintenance chores, but it’s important not to skip them. Catching a potential issue as it happens can be the difference between a minor hassle and a significant financial loss.
Here are the scans you should conduct weekly:
- Malware Scans: Check for malicious code
- File Scans: Check for any unauthorized file changes
- Vulnerability Scans: Check for security weaknesses
- Outdated Software Scans: Check for vulnerabilities in plugins, themes, and extensions
- Blacklist Scans: Check third-party blacklist services to see if your website is flagged
When interpreting scan results, pay particular attention to the security risk assessment. The most severe vulnerabilities — critical or high-risk issues — often indicate the presence of active malware, admin-level file changes, or strange user behavior. These vulnerabilities require immediate correction. Medium-risk issues, on the other hand, should be checked in the next 24 to 48 hours. However, you can often delay handling low-risk issues until planned maintenance periods.
Common fixes you might need to apply include:
- Quarantining any files infected by malware.
- Removing malicious code manually or restoring a backup.
- Replacing any modified files via a backup or a fresh installation.
- Updating or replacing any vulnerable plugins and themes.
- Limiting login attempts to mitigate brute force attacks.
Check for Broken Links
Checking for broken links helps you maintain clean, user-friendly navigation and a smooth flow of link equity across your site. Broken Link Checker is among the most straightforward solutions for this because you can schedule automatic scans across all your posts, pages, and site comments. Then, you just need to check the reports weekly and edit any broken links through the plugin interface.
Alternatively, you could run site audits through a tool like Ahrefs to maintain WordPress link health. However, you’ll have to correct each broken link manually at the source.
If you’re suddenly seeing many broken links, this is often due to changes in site architecture. The quickest way to fix the problem is to redirect all old URLs at once. To do this:
- Install a redirect management plugin like Redirection.
- Access the plugin under Tools.
- Navigate to “Add New Redirection.”
- Enter the old URL as the source and the new URL as the target.
- Click “Add Redirect.”
Monthly Maintenance Tasks
Your attention shifts to site optimization during monthly oversight. Follow these WordPress maintenance tips to ensure your site is responsive and functional.
Optimize Your Database
Your WordPress database stores site content, such as posts and pages, along with comments, user settings, and metadata. As your site grows, your database accumulates post revisions, deleted content, and temporary data that leaves it bloated.
While you can delete unneeded data manually, the easiest way to optimize your database is to schedule automatic monthly optimizations using a plugin such as WP-Optimize or Advanced Database Cleaner. To do this, simply install your desired plugin and set the optimization schedule within its settings. Then, select the specific tasks you want the plugin to perform each month, such as removing spam comments and post revisions.
Review Site Speed and Performance
Fast performance helps your site outrank others when all else is equal, making it one of the simplest ways to enhance your WordPress SEO. However, you’ll need to perform monthly tests and optimizations to maintain this performance.
Start by checking your site’s metrics with speed test tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTMetrix. These tools measure much of what Google looks for when evaluating page performance (such as core web vitals). They also guide you in fixing any issues you find.
However, you needn’t address everything manually, as plugins such as WP Rocket and NitroPack can automate much of this process. Potential opportunities for improvement include:
- Minifying JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.
- Compressing and optimizing images.
- Lazy-loading images below the fold.
- Removing unused plugins and themes.
- Switching to a lightweight theme.
- Optimizing your database regularly.
- Implementing caching.
- Using a content delivery network.
Optimization plugins can implement most of these changes. However, don’t forget to create a backup beforehand. You should also check several pages afterward to verify everything works correctly.
Learn more about WordPress speed optimization.
Test Website Functionality
Website functionality can break for many reasons, including plugin and theme compatibility issues, database corruption, and changes in file permissions. Check the following things each month:
- Contact Forms: Submit test messages using various input combinations to identify any problems. Then, confirm that you receive the messages and that any auto-responders reply correctly.
- Comment Sections: Send comments as both anonymous and logged-in users, then check for notifications. You can also include links or flagged phrases to confirm that your site’s anti-spam measures work.
- Ecommerce Functions: Test each ecommerce page by adding products to a cart. Next, update the cart quantities and try applying coupons. Test the checkout process with each payment option and ensure that order notifications and inventory management updates function correctly.
If you’re making major tweaks to your website’s functionality, schedule testing ahead of time and check everything using a staging site before making the changes. You can do this with a duplicate version of your site or by using a plugin like WP Staging.
Quarterly or Bi-Annual Maintenance Tasks
Save maintenance tasks that require lots of work or pre-planning for a set timetable throughout the year. Typically, these chores should include site audits and hosting reviews.
Comprehensive Site Audit
A comprehensive site audit measures every aspect of site performance, including these three factors:
- SEO: Content performance, backlinks, keyword optimization, etc.
- Security: Vulnerability checks, malware detection, SSL certificate validity, etc.
- Performance: Loading times, mobile-friendliness, user experience, etc.
The easiest way to perform the audit is to use a tool like Ahrefs, which analyzes most of the things your audit should include. However, consider using multiple tools together for a more comprehensive view of your site’s health.
For example, you could use Screaming Frog to gain deeper insights into your site’s crawlability. PageSpeed Insights provides more information about site speed than a basic audit, and security tools like Sucuri offer deeper vulnerability scans.
Check your plugin and theme list as another aspect of the audit, and look for anything that hasn’t received an update for quite some time. Abandoned plugins and themes can eventually cause security and compatibility concerns, so consider swapping to alternatives that receive more frequent updates.
Review Hosting and Server Resources
It’s great to see your traffic and sales grow over time, but visitor growth leads to greater strain on your server. While you should always keep an eye on your server’s performance, you can also use quarterly reviews as a chance to evaluate things further and consider new hosting options.
WordPress hosting falls into a few categories:
- Shared hosting
- Virtual private server (VPS)
- Dedicated hosting
- Cloud hosting
Shared servers host multiple websites, but a dedicated server only hosts one. A VPS replicates some of the performance benefits of dedicated hosting on a shared server. Cloud hosting scales with performance needs.
For larger sites, you’ll almost always want a dedicated server. However, cloud hosting is also a great alternative thanks to its scalability and low downtime risks. Regardless of the server type, WordPress-specific hosting platforms are often ideal because they’re optimized for WordPress to run perfectly.
To determine whether you need an upgrade, check whether your CPU usage exceeds 80% during peak times or your RAM utilization approaches 90%. You can find these metrics in your hosting dashboard. You may also want to upgrade just your data bandwidth if CPU and RAM are within range.
Additional WordPress-Specific Considerations
Now that most chores are out of the way, we still have a few additional WordPress maintenance tips to boost your site’s performance.
Regularly Check Users
Over time, you may end up with several users and administrators on your WordPress instance. This can introduce vulnerabilities, especially if some of those users are no longer with your company.
Create a system for offboarding users. Regularly check the list of users and prune any users who shouldn’t have access.
Monitor Disk Usage and Hosting Storage
High disc usage affects plans for site growth because it limits your ability to add more media or store additional backups on-site. As such, it’s something you should check from time to time, either through your hosting dashboard or a plugin like WP-Optimize.
If you’re close to your storage capacity, try to recover space by removing temporary and unneeded files first. You could also move the bulk of your backups off-site. Otherwise, if you still need more space, it might be time to upgrade your storage. Luckily, many hosting providers let you do this without changing other aspects of your server, minimizing added running costs.
Keep Maintenance Consistent for Optimal Results
Regular WordPress website maintenance improves your site’s performance, limits security risks, and enhances user experience, all of which are direct or indirect search engine ranking factors. However, it’s common to feel overwhelmed when considering the scope of this maintenance. The best way to keep track of things is to plan ahead and schedule things on a daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis.
Alternatively, leave things to the experts with our website maintenance services and WordPress SEO services. Contact us for a free consultation, and we’ll develop a tailored plan for managing your site. We’ll take care of growth and performance while you take care of your customers.
