WordPress Maintenance

WordPress Maintenance: A Guide for Site Owners

Do you need help keeping your WordPress website running smoothly and securely? If so, you’ve come to the right place.

This guide will give you all the information you need to take care of your WordPress website and keep it running as efficiently as possible.

We’ll talk about why maintenance is so important, how often you should be doing it, and what tasks should be completed in order to keep your site up-to-date.


Why Maintain Your WordPress Website?

Maintaining your WordPress website is essential for ensuring that the site is running quickly, securely, and without any errors.

The number of WordPress vulnerabilities continues to grow each year.

WPScan’s database saw a significant rise in the number of WordPress vulnerabilities last year, with close to 2,000 new entries. Of these, 92% were attributed to WordPress plugins, 5% to themes, and 3% to WordPress core.

WordPress Vulnerabilities by Component

WordPress Vulnerabilities by Component
Source: WPScan

However, staying up-to-date with the latest updates for WordPress, themes, and plugins can help reduce the risk of security issues and optimize performance.

And regular website backups are necessary in case something goes wrong or a plugin error causes your site to crash.

⚡ Check also ➡️ How Secure and Reliable Is WordPress? (Key WordPress Security Vulnerabilities)


What Tasks Should You Perform for Maintenance?

When it comes to maintaining your website, there are a few different tasks that should be done regularly:


1. Back Up Your Website

Backing up your website on a regular basis is an essential task when it comes to preventing major losses of data due to plugin errors or hardware malfunctions.

A backup will ensure that all of your content can be restored should something happen unexpectedly.

There are a variety of ways in which you can back up your website including using free plugins like Updraft that can help you set up schedules for regular backups and even save them to cloud storage services like Dropbox and Google Drive.

Remote storage options on UpdraftPlus
Remote storage options on UpdraftPlus

2. Update Plugins & Themes

Keeping all plugins and themes on your site updated will help prevent potential security vulnerabilities as well as increase performance and speed up loading times for visitors.

When updating plugins always make sure that the new version is compatible with all other installed software on the server.

Updating WordPress plugin
Updating WordPress plugin

Additionally, it’s important to delete any unused plugins from the server as they may contain security flaws if not updated properly or regularly.

Read more ➡️ How to Edit a WordPress Site? (For Beginners)


3. Monitor Security & Performance

It’s important to monitor your website’s security and performance so that you know when an issue arises before it causes major damage or disruption to user experience.

There are multiple tools available, such as Sucuri Security Plugin which scans for malicious code on a daily basis and reports any issues directly through email notifications.

Sucuri Security dashboard
Sucuri Security dashboard

Additionally, services like Pingdom offer real-time monitoring for uptime so that you know immediately when something goes wrong with the server.


How Often Should You Perform Maintenance?

The frequency of maintenance largely depends on the rate of changes to the content of your website and how many visitors there are per day/week/month etc.

Generally speaking, you should back up your WordPress website weekly, while updates should be done monthly at a minimum in order to ensure optimal uptime and performance levels remain consistent throughout periods of high traffic or activity on the site.

Monitoring security and performance can also vary depending on certain conditions. Ideally, this should be done at least once every 24 hours to detect any new threats or issues before they disrupt user experience dramatically or cause data loss due to malicious activities/breaches.

⚡ Check also ➡️ How To Know Who Visited My Website (a Quick Guide)


Conclusion

Keeping up with regular maintenance tasks such as updating plugins/themes, backing up data repeatedly, monitoring security/performance on a daily basis, etc. is crucial for ensuring optimal uptime levels and security measures remain consistent throughout periods of high traffic/activity on a site.

Doing these things regularly, can help prevent potential disruptions caused by viruses/hackers or outdated code from impacting user experience altogether, allowing users to access their content without interruption day after day!

🤓 Want to learn more about WordPress and websites?

Feel free to browse our blog for more helpful tips about WordPress, websites, and so on.


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NJ

NJ is all about websites and AI. With years of experience building cool sites, he's also got a knack for diving into AI's exciting possibilities. Always on the hunt for the next big thing, NJ loves to share his discoveries with the world. Whether it's a groundbreaking tool or a fresh concept, if NJ's talking about it, you know it's worth a look.

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