WordPress website maintenance basics you need to know

Essential WordPress maintenance tasks

1. Regular updates

• WordPress core updates: These are critical software updates containing security patches, bug fixes, and new features that keep your site running smoothly. To implement these updates, simply access the Updates section in your WordPress dashboard and follow the prompts.
• Plugin updates: These provide improvements and security patches for your plugins. You can review available plugin updates in your dashboard and update them individually, in bulk or enable auto-updates.
• Theme updates: These deliver design and functionality improvements for your site’s appearance and layout and ensure compatibility with the latest WordPress core. To update your theme, check the Themes section in your WordPress dashboard for available updates.

2. Website backups

Website backups provide essential protection against hacking attempts, data corruption, and accidental changes that could otherwise cripple your website. With proper backups in place, you’ll have restoration points that allow for quick recovery after an incident, minimizing downtime and potential revenue loss.

When selecting your backup strategy, consider your update frequency, available storage, and recovery time objectives. Types of backups include:

• Full site backup: Includes all files and database content, providing complete protection but requiring more storage space.
• Database backup: Focuses specifically on your content, users, and settings, which are often the most critical and frequently changed elements.
• Incremental backups: Stores only the changes made since your last backup, offering efficiency for sites with large file sizes.

Regular backups are fundamental for business continuity, and your frequency depends on how often your content changes and how critical your site is:

• Ecommerce and high-traffic sites should implement daily backups to minimize potential data loss in case of an incident
• Business sites with regular but less frequent updates may find weekly backups sufficient for their needs
• Smaller sites with minimal changes might be adequately protected with monthly backups

Implementation options include WordPress plugins like UpdraftPlus, hosting provider backups, or manual exports to external storage.

3. Security monitoring and protection

Website security is vital for all businesses—not just those that hold customer data. To protect yourself from vulnerabilities, a multi-layered approach is essential. Start by installing a dedicated WordPress security plugin like Wordfence or Sucuri that provides features like security scans, malware removal, firewall protection, brute force attack protection, and even backups.

Performing a regular malware scan will help keep your data safe, and security breaches rare. Update passwords regularly and implement strong password policies for all users with access to your site. For additional security, consider implementing two-factor authentication for administrator accounts, adding an extra verification layer beyond passwords alone.

4. Performance optimization

• Database optimization: Your WordPress database can accumulate significant bloat over time, gradually slowing down your site. Regular database optimization involves removing unused files, inactive plugins, spam comments, and redundant software. Many WordPress optimization plugins can automate this process, making it easier to maintain a streamlined database that serves content quickly.
• Uptime monitoring: Uptime monitoring enables server resource usage tracking to plan scaling as well as alerts for when your site becomes unavailable, even across geographic locations. This allows for a quick response to potential issues as well as insight into how your site performs for users worldwide.
• Speed testing tools: Tools like PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix or Pingdom can help measure your site’s load times, identify performance bottlenecks, and offer recommendations for improvement that can assist in setting performance benchmarks, particularly for sites like ecommerce businesses where speed directly impacts conversion rates. 
• Caching: It helps in reducing load times and creating a faster experience for all users. Page caching creates static HTML versions of your dynamic content, and browser caching tells visitors’ browsers to store certain files locally, reducing the need to re-download resources on repeat visits. For global audiences, implementing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) distributes your static content across servers worldwide, ensuring visitors receive data from the closest geographic location.

5. SEO maintenance

• Crawling issues: Regularly check Google Search Console (GSC) for crawl errors that might prevent your pages from appearing in search results. Review and update your robots.txt file periodically to ensure you’re not accidentally blocking important content, and verify that your XML sitemap is up to date and properly submitted to search engines. 
• Broken links and images: This could harm site credibility and impact user experience. Implement regular scans to identify and fix 404 errors throughout your site using tools like WordPress SEO plugins and conduct proper 301 redirects on any content that is moved to maintain user flow. Regularly verify that all image files load correctly and replace or repair broken images promptly.
• Duplicate content: This can impact rankings and dilute meaningful traffic. Regularly audit your site to identify and consolidate pages with similar content, which often happens with product variations, archived content, or filtered views. Implement proper canonical tags to indicate the preferred version when similar content must exist.
• Traffic performance: Review Google Analytics data regularly to keep track of metrics like bounce rate, time on page, and conversion paths to understand visitor patterns, popular content, and identify potential UX issues. This ongoing analysis helps you focus maintenance efforts where they’ll have the greatest impact on business results.

6. Accessibility checks

Maintaining website accessibility ensures all users can access your content regardless of disabilities or limitations while also helping avoid potential legal issues. These include following best practices for descriptive text (alt text for images and contextual anchor text for links), keyboard navigation, screen reader compatibility, heading structure hierarchy, color contrast ratios between text and backgrounds, and many more elements.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is a great resource to learn more about these standards, along with tools like WAVE, Lighthouse, or Accessibility Insights that can help identify areas for improving site accessibility.

7. Maintenance mode

Maintenance mode helps prevent visitors from encountering a site during updates, which could create a poor impression and damage trust in your brand, and instead notifies them of ongoing site improvements.

The UX of your maintenance page matters more than you think. It needs to reflect your brand’s visual identity and voice, maintaining consistency with your overall site design. It should also include an expected completion time or date to set appropriate visitor expectations and reduce frustration.

Proactive communication about maintenance minimizes disruption to your users. Alert regular users in advance of planned maintenance through on-site notifications or banners, or through emails and social channels, giving them time to complete any ongoing processes before the site becomes unavailable.