April 29, 2024 
Quick answer: We all love WordPress. Easy to use, powerful, customizable, and powering over 45.8% of all websites in 2023 – it's no wonder! Yet, when it comes to WordPress maintenance, the enthusiasm tends to wane a bit.
We all love WordPress. Easy to use, powerful, customizable, and powering over 45.8% of all websites in 2023 – it’s no wonder! Yet, when it comes to WordPress maintenance, the enthusiasm tends to wane a bit.
So you’ve launched a stunning WordPress website. It’s sleek, user-friendly, and humming with fresh content. You’re living the dream! But then, those little notification gremlins start popping up: ‘Plugin Update Available,’ ‘Important Security Patch Released!
Suddenly, the world of WordPress maintenance seems a little less dreamy and a whole lot more…confusing.
At times, updating a plugin is simple, and everything works just fine. Other times, it’s like navigating a minefield blindfolded, and you have no idea what left your website broken. It’s a scenario many of us are all too familiar with.
The truth is, updates are as normal for WordPress as a weekly cleaning routine is for your home. This makes WordPress website maintenance crucial for keeping your site sparkling, secure, and running smoothly. And with the right knowledge, this can be a breeze.
Let’s shake off those update blues and navigate the world of WordPress maintenance! Explore best practices, the essential maintenance plan, and troubleshooting pitfalls to ensure your website always maintains its sparkle.
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Why is WordPress Maintenance Necessary?
At Troon, we believe that “building a high quality and intuitive website or application is an investment in yourself, your business, and your customers. Hosting, maintenance, and support help protect that investment.”
Regular WordPress maintenance keeps your website secure, fast, and functioning at its peak performance making it a powerful tool to achieve your digital goals. Just like any asset, your WordPress site requires care and attention. Here’s why maintenance is necessary:
Enhances Security
Being popular has its downsides. WordPress is a beacon for hackers and malicious actors, who prey on vulnerabilities in outdated plugins, themes, and core software. Regular maintenance strengthens your site’s defenses against such threats. Additionally, regular backups serve as a safety net, preventing a data loss disaster in the case of an attack.
Improves Website Performance
Constant improvements can often lead to a clutter of unwanted items like unused code, outdated plugins, and a bloated database. These can greatly drag down your site’s performance. A routine clean sweep during your WordPress maintenance plan keeps your website running smoothly.
Ensures Compatibility
Mismatched versions of WordPress and plugins can lead to compatibility headaches. Keeping everything updated ensures seamless operation, letting you leverage the latest features without a hitch.
Adds New Functionality
WordPress maintenance updates often come with the latest features along with bug fixes. Staying current means providing the best possible user experience and keeping your site competitive!
Scalability
Your website grows with your business. Whether your website requires new services or content, or you are witnessing an influx of traffic, maintenance services can help you scale your website accordingly. Scalability isn’t typically a default component of basic website maintenance packages, but it’s often offered as an add-on in higher-tier plans.
Better Engagement
A well-performing, fast, optimized, and secure website can make a big difference in keeping your visitors hooked. Making sure your site is easy to navigate, quick to load, and works well on any device, helps grab your visitors’ attention and keeps them coming back for more!
Protect SEO Rankings
It’s no secret that search engines prefer websites that prioritize security, speed, and user experience. Neglecting WordPress website maintenance can lead to security breaches, slow loading, and broken pages – all of which can harm your rankings. Moreover, regular updates can signal search engines that your site is well-managed, reliable, and up to date – all working in your favor!
Peace of Mind
Nobody wants website crashes, security issues, or unexpected layout changes. Apart from a bad user experience, these can lead to a significant loss in revenue. Regular maintenance helps prevent these problems, giving you peace of mind and freeing you to focus on what matters – creating amazing content!
Think of WordPress maintenance and support as an investment in your website’s future. By dedicating a little time and effort routinely, you’ll ensure your website stays safe, fast, and functional, ultimately attracting visitors and achieving your online goals.
Understanding WordPress Updates: Core, Plugins & Theme
Understanding the various components that require WordPress updates can help you manage your WordPress site more effectively. The three main areas of WordPress that often need attention include the WordPress core, plugins, and theme.
WordPress Core Updates
The WordPress core is the foundation that requires WordPress to work and power websites. It constitutes the Content Management System (CMS).
Major Updates:
These releases introduce new features and significant changes. You’ll recognize them by their version numbers like 5.0, 5.1, etc.
Minor Updates:
These focus on security fixes, bugs, maintenance, and minor enhancements. They are shown as a change in the third sequence of version numbers e.g. 5.1.1 or 5.4.2 and are generally safe to apply without breaking your site.
Development Updates:
Aimed at developers, these updates allow users to test upcoming features and changes in WordPress.
By default, WordPress handles most minor updates automatically, helping keep your site safe without lifting a finger. Major updates, however, require manual initiation. While the automatic updates for minor releases boost security, it’s important not to ignore the major ones—they bring substantial improvements and new functionalities to the table.
WordPress Plugin Updates
Plugins are used to add extra functionality to your WordPress site, like contact forms, SEO optimization, social media sharing, and more. Since each plugin may have a different publisher, they don’t follow the same update pattern. Updates could include anything from security patches to new features or bug fixes. Managing them is straightforward through the “Plugins” section in your WordPress admin area.
It can get very tricky though if you have written custom code and customized a plugin or if there are compatibility issues. It’s best to check compatibility with your WordPress version and other installed plugins before updating. This requires reading the plugin changelog. In case there is a conflict, your website processes can run into problems.
Unlike core updates, plugins typically need manual approval to update. However, at times plugin updates can be automatic especially if they are being updated for critical security reasons.
Unlike core updates, plugins typically need manual approval to update. However, at times plugin updates can be automatic especially if they are being updated for critical security reasons.
WordPress Theme Updates
Themes control the visual appearance of your site, including layout, colors, and fonts. These updates can bring new styles, fix bugs, or patch security vulnerabilities. However, if you’ve customized your theme directly, updates can overwrite those changes.
To preserve customizations, using a “child theme” is recommended. A child theme inherits the parent theme’s look and functionality but keeps your changes safe during updates.
Understanding and managing WordPress updates is a key aspect of your WordPress site maintenance. Updates can be fairly straightforward, however with customizations and differing versions, you can run into compatibility issues.
Let’s learn the best way to WordPress implement updates and mitigate risks.
Before You Begin WordPress Maintenance
WordPress maintenance can be a breeze! You only need a foolproof backup plan and follow best practices to prevent problems. Here’s where you need to start:
Backups: Your Website’s Safety Net
Backups will always be your most trusted safety partner. Before upgrading WordPress, take a moment to create a complete backup of your website. This should include everything: the WordPress database, media files, plugins, themes, configuration files, and the core WordPress files themselves.
If you’re using an automated backup plugin, it’s also wise to create a manual backup. Store this manual backup in a safe, remote location like your computer or a cloud storage. This ensures you can easily restore your site if anything unexpected happens during the upgrade process.
Compatibility Checks: Preventing Update Nuisances
While updates are essential for the security and functionality of your site, they can sometimes end up causing problems. Incompatibilities can lead to broken features, display issues, or even complete site breakdowns.
Compatibility checks for your PHP version, WordPress version, plugins, and themes, help you anticipate potential problems before they occur. By verifying compatibility with new updates—especially with major WordPress releases—you can ensure that the new updates will work seamlessly with your existing site components. Developers normally indicate compatibility on their product pages or plugin changelogs. Reviewing these will help you avoid potential conflicts before updating.
Staging Environment: A Testing Ground for Updates
A staging environment is a replica of your live website on a separate server. It’s the perfect testing ground for updates and changes before they go public. You can install new plugins, themes, and apply updates on the staging site first. This allows you to identify and resolve any issues before they impact your live website and its visitors.
Turn off caching: Ensure a Smooth Process
Caching can interfere with the update process by showing outdated content or causing conflicts. Disabling caching helps ensure that updates apply correctly and that you can accurately assess the changes on your site without cached data masking any issues. Once maintenance is complete and everything is functioning as expected, you can reactivate caching to speed up your site’s performance.
Child Themes: Customization Without Update Worries
WordPress themes control the visual appearance of your site. However, directly modifying theme files can become a challenge when updates arrive as they can overwrite your customizations, leading to a loss of modifications.
A child theme inherits all the features and styles from a parent theme but allows you to customize specific elements without affecting the parent theme’s core files. When a parent theme receives an update, your customizations within the child theme remain intact.
Stay Informed: Keeping Tabs on News Regarding Updates
It’s vital to stay informed about the latest WordPress updates and potential security vulnerabilities. By keeping your finger on the pulse, you can be the first to know about important changes and learn from the experiences of others. This can also help you decide whether an update can be held off for later or needs to be installed instantly.
Reliable sources for this include the official WordPress.org website, as well as many plugin and theme developers who run their own websites and blogs for announcements. Additionally security-focused and website maintenance blogs and newsletters offer valuable insights and best practices.
21 Step WordPress Maintenance Plan & Checklist
From taking backups and enhancing content to security checks and performance optimizations, a thorough WordPress maintenance plan is crucial to maintaining a healthy website!
Here’s our expert checklist, step by step! At Troon, we make sure our website maintenance services are absolutely thorough for a thriving website, and the best possible experience for your visitors.
1. Take Backups and Store Off-Site
The importance of backups cannot be overstated and routine, weekly backups are the way to go. It’s recommended to take a complete backup and store it securely. In case you ever need it, an updated copy should be easily accessible.
2. Upgrade the WordPress Version
If a new version of WordPress is available, updating as soon as possible is crucial to maintain your site’s security, fix bugs, and gain access to the latest features. However, major updates can sometimes conflict with existing themes and plugins, risking potential disruptions to your site. To mitigate this, it’s advisable to first create a staging site for testing any significant updates, as previously mentioned.
To update the WordPress version, simply log in to your site’s admin area, navigate to ‘Dashboard’ > ‘Updates’, and click on the button to initiate the update. WordPress will handle the installation. Alternatively, you can manually update by downloading the latest version from the WordPress website and uploading it to your site’s root folder via an FTP client.
3. Check and Update WordPress Themes and Plugins
Once your WordPress version is up to date, the next step in the WordPress maintenance plan involves updating your themes and plugins. It’s crucial to review the changelogs and, ideally, test updates in a staging environment before proceeding. To access updates, navigate to the ‘Updates’ page from the dashboard menu, where you can either update themes and plugins individually or use the “Select All” option for efficiency.
After applying updates, conduct thorough tests to verify the smooth functionality of your site. This ensures everything is working as expected. If not, re-examining the plugin’s settings or considering alternative plugins and customizations might be necessary.
It is not recommended to go back to the outdated version as it can be harmful. Outdated software often lacks critical security patches and bug fixes, leaving your website vulnerable.
4. Visual Inspection Check
For a stellar user experience, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Navigate your entire website, checking for broken links, typos, low-res images, dead-end forms, spam comments, formatting issues, or intrusive pop-ups. A smooth and error-free journey, from start to finish, is key to user satisfaction, conversions, and a strong brand image. Fix any roadblocks you encounter to ensure users can smoothly navigate and complete your goal.
5. Delete Unused Plugins
While plugins offer amazing features for your WordPress website, resist the urge to hoard them! Unused plugins are not only clutter but also security vulnerabilities. Since they likely won’t be updated, they can become entry points for hackers. Regularly review your plugins and delete any that aren’t actively serving your website’s needs. This keeps your site streamlined and secure.
6. Site Speed Check
A site speed check is a great way to identify issues that may be slowing down your WordPress site. Use the Google PageSpeed Insights tool for a quick and valuable analysis. This tool not only checks speed but also provides insights on your Core Web Vitals (critical metrics for a good user experience) and offers suggestions for improvement.
You can also use other tools for an even deeper understanding.
7. Performance Optimization: Image & Database Optimization, Caching
Over time, unused images, posts, forms, and comments, can clutter your WordPress database and slow down your site. It’s essential to regularly clean & maintain this “database trash” for optimal performance. It doesn’t have to be all manual, use a plugin to automate the process!
Additionally, large image files can bog down your website. Use image compression tools to shrink them to the smallest size possible without sacrificing quality.
Furthermore, caching plugins can greatly help optimize performance by storing temporary copies of your website’s pages. These pages load instantly for returning visitors, improving user experience and reducing server load.
8. Check WordPress User Accounts
User accounts are an easy access point for hackers and therefore an important part of your WordPress website maintenance plan. Fortifying user accounts with strong password requirements, two-factor authentication, and removing inactive users helps prevent unauthorized access.
9. Check for Broken Links
Don’t let broken links drag your website down! These can frustrate visitors and confuse search engines, impacting your ranking. Luckily, identifying broken links is easy with any site audit tool. Once you have a list, simply update the link to the correct page or set up redirects to guide users seamlessly.
10. Test Your Forms
Testing your website’s forms is a crucial task in WordPress maintenance. Forms play a vital role in user engagement, allowing for newsletter signups, contact inquiries, feedback submissions, and more. Regularly checking each form for functionality—confirming they send data correctly and that notifications are received—helps prevent missed connections with your audience. Tools and plugins like WPForms or Gravity Forms offer features to simplify this process, including confirmation messages and email notifications upon form submission.
11. Test Automated Email Notifications
A well functioning WordPress website relies on clear communication channels! Site maintenance involves checking your email notifications such as contact form submissions, order confirmations, newsletter signups, and password reset requests. Sending a test email to yourself allows you to verify if these emails are being delivered correctly and contain accurate information. Tools like WP Mail SMTP can be instrumental in diagnosing and resolving delivery issues by improving email deliverability and providing logging capabilities to track email success rates.
12. Ecommerce Maintenance
If your website is used to sell products or services it’s important to make sure the checkout process is smooth and error free.
Additionally, optimizing product pages for load speed, conducting inventory checks, reviewing and updating product descriptions and prices, and ensuring all payment gateways function correctly are essential tasks.
13. Review Security & Malware Scans
Security scans help detect vulnerabilities and malware on your site and offer effective solutions to mitigate these risks. To further strengthen your defenses, consider security plugins that act as a firewall, shielding your site from common attacks like brute-force attempts and malicious code injections. Some great starting points are Sucuri Security or Wordfence.
14. Test Site on all Browsers and Devices
First impressions matter! With only 3 seconds to grab a visitor’s attention, ensure your well-maintained WordPress site delivers a stunning experience across all devices – desktops, mobiles, tablets, and even 4K screens. And don’t forget compatibility! Responsive design ensures your website adapts seamlessly to all browsers, keeping users happy and engaged regardless of how they choose to access your site.
15. Check Backup Health
Apart from backups being complete and recent, it’s crucial they must be restorable. Testing restores from your backups periodically verifies their integrity and guarantees you can quickly recover your site when needed. Many backup plugins offer built-in testing features.
Alternatively, if you have a staging environment, you can perform a test restore there – this allows for a more thorough check without impacting your live website.
16. Check Uptime Logs
Uptime logs provide a record of any downtime your site may have experienced. Regularly checking these logs allows you to identify potential issues. You can pinpoint recurring problems, investigate causes (like server overload or plugin conflicts), and implement solutions to ensure your website remains online and accessible to your audience.
17. Media Track Delivery
Media tracking ensures your images, videos, and other downloadable content are delivered efficiently. Many hosting providers offer tools to track media delivery which can reveal issues like slow loading times or broken links for your media files. By addressing these issues, you optimize media delivery, enhancing user experience and ensuring your valuable content loads smoothly for your visitors.
18. Google Analytics & Search Console
Google Analytics and Search Console are essential to understand the actions visitors are taking on your website. Make sure they are connected properly. If a new version of analytics is available, it’s best to configure it at your earliest.
Reviewing data and reports on website statistics can help you make significant improvements. Is your website traffic declining after you made changes to a page? Are the users engaging on your site? Is there unexpected traffic such as from a referral spam which can indicate you need to tighten your security?
19. Load Time Test
Regular load time tests are an important part of a WordPress maintenance plan, especially if your visitors are constantly growing! Free tools like GTMetrix are a great starting point. These tools analyze your website’s speed and provide actionable recommendations for optimization. Consider factors like image compression, caching plugins, and minified code. By addressing these elements and conducting regular load time tests, you can ensure your WordPress website delivers a lightning-fast experience for your visitors.
20. Check Expiration of Hosting and Domains
Regularly check your WordPress hosting and domain registration expiration dates to avoid unexpected downtime. Consider setting up auto-renewal for both – this simple step ensures uninterrupted service and protects your valuable online presence.
21. Update Site Information and details
As your business evolves over time your social media channels may increase, and your address, numbers, and email address may change. Always make sure your information is up to date such as the about us page to keep your customers updated.
Once you have performed all your WordPress maintenance tasks it’s essential to do a thorough quality assurance check. Even the most well-intentioned changes can sometimes have unintended consequences. It’s recommended to test the core functionality, browse different pages, check responsiveness, and review for errors. This final step ensures that your maintenance efforts haven’t inadvertently broken something else on your website.
How to Maintain a WordPress Site?
The best option for maintaining your WordPress website depends on your budget, technical expertise, and the complexity of your website.
Use a WordPress Maintenance Plugin
Ideal for:
Very small and simple websites
Benefits:
Somewhat simplifies maintenance by automating some routine tasks like backups, security scans, performance optimizations, and updates.
Considerations:
Very few elements of the maintenance checklist are covered. Your WP core, theme, and plugins may be automatically updated but if there are conflicts leaving your site broken, you will need to handle these manually. You might also need multiple plugins to cover all maintenance aspects, and each comes with its own costs.
Hire a WordPress Maintenance Service
Ideal for:
Larger websites or for those who don’t prefer to handle the technical aspects.
Benefits:
Offers peace of mind by handing over all technical aspects of site maintenance & testing to experts. This includes regular updates, security monitoring, technical support, and emergency assistance. Troon Technologies offers a rapid response time for site outages.
Considerations:
The cost can be higher than the other two options but it includes comprehensive care and is invaluable for those looking to focus on their business rather than technical maintenance.
Do It Yourself Manually
Ideal for:
Those with technical proficiency
Benefits:
Gives you full control over your website, allowing for a deeper understanding of its functionality. This method involves hands-on updates, security monitoring, performance optimization, and backup management.
Considerations:
You need to stay informed about WordPress’s best practices, new security vulnerabilities, and the latest updates to maintain your site effectively. Requires time and some investment in plugins and tools to make the update process smoother.
Choosing a Support Solution & WordPress Maintenance Cost
If you don’t have in-house technical support, outsourcing website maintenance to a company specializing in WordPress maintenance services and hosting is a practical approach to accessing the necessary expertise. There are a number of companies that offer WordPress website maintenance packages & hosting solutions and it can be overwhelming. Here are a few rules of thumb to help navigate your choices:
If you are spending less than $100/month you are likely not getting what you need
The average cost of a development resource ranges from $50 -150/hour and there are on average, at least 3 hours of work per month required to maintain the most basic site. Even if this is a loss liter for a business, at $100/month you are still getting a bargain.
If your package does NOT include error checking and fixes with the updates, you might have a problem
Oftentimes, basic hosting & maintenance includes updates but do not have error checking and fixes following the updates. It is a rare update that does not affect other parts of a website or application. If only the update is done, you will be spending a lot of time (and $$) fixing the issues that these updates have caused.
If possible, choose a provider you trust
Using a company that you already have established a good working relationship can help when evaluating your options. They have worked hard to earn your trust and will want you to be successful as you grow.
Don’t let technical issues slow you down, keep your WordPress site at its best.
Troon’s expert team is ready to handle all your WordPress maintenance & updates.
WordPress Maintenance Must Haves
Here are some services that you must agree on with your support solution provider to ensure your website continues to run smoothly:
Server Maintenance
It doesn’t matter what type of server you choose, it needs to be maintained. This means ensuring there are ample resources (space and speed) for the websites or applications that are on it, applying operating system patches as they are released, keeping firewalls updated etc.
Your Website Maintenance
This should include all relevant tasks from the WordPress maintenance plan above. However, make sure frequent backups, and updates to all components (framework, plugin, API, CMS etc.) along with QA, frequent site speed checks, performance optimizations, virus protection, and issue resolution are included.
Quick and tiered access to a webmaster
In high-priority situations, you should have immediate access to a webmaster. This can look like a 15-minute response during business hours for critical issues like site outages and 45 minutes for any issue disrupting the sales funnel.
How Long Does WordPress Maintenance Take?
The time it takes to update and maintain a WordPress website depends on the size and complexity of the site, the maintenance tasks performed, how often you maintain it, and your technical expertise.
Websites with numerous pages, extensive customizations, and a variety of plugins and themes will naturally require more time to update and maintain. You can perform thorough maintenance tasks once a month and do quick 30 to 60 minute maintenance checks each week to keep your site in optimal condition. Overall, it will take at least 3 hours minimum each month to cover the WordPress maintenance checklist even on a small (5-10 page) website.
WordPress Maintenance Mode
While you’re working on your WordPress website maintenance, it can appear broken to your users creating a negative impression. Putting your WordPress site into maintenance mode is a smart way to avoid showing users a work-in-progress site that might look broken. It’s like hanging a “We’re improving for you” sign that tells visitors you’re making updates but will be back shortly with something better.
Note: For minimal downtime, consider performing updates and testing them on a staging site first. This allows for a smooth transition to your live website, minimizing disruptions to the visitor experience.
When you update WordPress core, plugins, or themes, WordPress automatically puts your site in maintenance mode. This mode is typically very brief — often just a few seconds or minutes — and displays a message like “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.”
Customizing Maintenance Mode
While the default maintenance message is fine for quick updates, you might want to customize the appearance and message of your maintenance mode screen for longer maintenance periods. This can be done in two main ways:
Using a Plugin:There are several plugins available that allow you to customize the maintenance mode page. These plugins often offer options to add images, customize text, and even add a countdown timer. Plugins like WP Maintenance Mode or Coming Soon Page & Maintenance Mode by SeedProd are popular choices.
Manually Enabling Maintenance Mode:For more control, you can manually enable maintenance mode by using .htaccess modifications or by adding a maintenance.php file to your wp-content directory. This method requires some technical knowledge, as you’ll be directly editing site files or code.
Disabling WordPress Maintenance Mode
Deactivating maintenance mode in WordPress is straightforward, regardless of how you activated it. If you enabled the maintenance mode manually, you’ll need to go back to the functions.php file and delete the previously added code. After removing the specific code snippet, save the
changes to the file.
If you opted for a plugin to initiate WordPress maintenance mode, disabling it is even more straightforward.
Access your WordPress dashboard by logging in.
Navigate to Settings > Your plugin name
Change the plugin status to Deactivated.
Save your changes by
clicking the Save Settings button.
The General tab is usually the default landing page; if you find yourself elsewhere, click on it to switch.
After disabling maintenance mode, it’s important to visit your site again in a new browser window to ensure that it is indeed live and accessible to visitors, confirming that maintenance mode has been fully deactivated.
Wrapping Up WordPress Maintenance Essentials
Maintaining a WordPress site is a crucial ongoing process that ensures the security, performance, and reliability of your online presence. From updating the WordPress core, themes, and plugins to customizing the maintenance mode for a seamless user experience, each step plays a vital role in keeping your site running smoothly. Remember, whether it’s website or app maintenance, regular backups and security checks are your safety nets against potential data loss and cyber threats.
Whether you choose to automate the process using plugins, opt for professional maintenance services, or manage updates manually, the goal remains the same: a well-maintained WordPress site that continues to serve your audience effectively. By staying proactive about maintenance, you not only enhance your site’s functionality but also bolster its security and improve the overall user experience, ensuring your site remains a valuable asset in your digital toolkit.
Make your WordPress website maintenance a breeze.
Contact Troon Technologies today to schedule your WordPress maintenance and updates, and enjoy peace of mind knowing your website is secure, fast, and always up-to-date!
