WordPress, on average, makes between 15 and 20 updates each year, that's an average of at least one update per month. Every time a new WordPress update comes out we get emails from our clients asking if it is safe to update their site. We always give the same answer which is, in most situations a small update will not break your website, but there are many factors. How many plugins do you have on your website, how long has it been since your last update, what type of server is the site running on? All of these variables can make a small monthly update quite stressful and in some cases even catastrophic.

Establishing a consistent monthly website maintenance process is the key to ensuring that your website does not crash during these updates and, more importantly, to preventing malware and other vulnerabilities. Taking a proactive approach to maintaining your website saves you a lot of time in the future and prevents larger problems from sneaking up on you.

WordPress Maintenance Checklist

Gekkota has been managing WordPress maintenance for a large number of clients over the last few years. Below is a list of what we believe to be the most reasonable checklist for monthly WordPress updates and maintenance.

1. Create website backups

The first and most important aspect of any WordPress maintenance checklist is to make sure you have a consistent backup schedule. This is especially important to do before updating WordPress or any plugins on your website.

OUR RECOMMENDATIONS

For the past five years, we've been using Akeeba Backup. Fantastic plugin for managing your website backups in Wordpress.

2. Check your website speed

Checking your website speed score monthly is an easy way to see if something drastic has happened to your site's performance. Recording your speed scores each month allows you to narrow down any changes that had a negative effect on your site speed or your overall performance score.

OUR RECOMMENDATIONS

We recommend using 2-speed test sites and logging your results each month. Track your desktop and mobile score on Google Page Speed and Pingdom Site Speed.

3. Review Search Console

Checking your Google Search Console monthly is a guaranteed way to stay on top of your website's health. Search Console provides useful information about broken links, site errors and excluded URLs; things that could be detrimental to your search rankings are usually shown here first.

OUR RECOMMENDATIONS

Check your coverage report and your mobile usage report in Google Search Console. You should check Google Analytics more often than Search Console.

4. Update WordPress

Following our first checklist is super important to do before tackling this part of the monthly website maintenance in case something goes wrong. It is also important to feel confident in your ability to restore your site from a backup. Being able to restore a previous version of your website is important before doing a WordPress upgrade. If that's out of your comfort zone, you may want to leave these updates to a developer or digital agency.

OUR RECOMMENDATIONS

Back up your site and review a few pages as a reminder of how things should look before making an update. Once completed, review several pages to make sure nothing is broken as a result of the update.

5. Update plugins

Just like WordPress updates, make sure you have a backup of your website before performing this step. For critical elements of the website, such as e-commerce plugins, it may be a good idea to use the changelog and make a note of the plugin version.

OUR RECOMMENDATIONS

Back up your site and review critical functionality before and after upgrading.

6. Check that comments do not contain spam

If you have a website with comment functionality, it is essential to check for comment spam that links to bad websites. This type of spam can slowly bring down your domain authority.

OUR RECOMMENDATIONS

Check the links of any new comments and review your pending, spam and deleted comments.

7. Security check

At this point, you have updated your site and plugins and removed spam comments and checked the health of your website through Google Search Console. However, ensuring that there are no security issues on your site is still very important. You can use a security plugin and do a quick check of the logs/alerts to make sure everything looks good.

OUR RECOMMENDATIONS

We recommend using the WordFence WordPress plugin, the logging and alerting system that the plugin uses is great.

Cost of maintaining a WordPress website

The cost of leaving a WordPress site unchecked could end up being extremely expensive for your business, so while the cheapest option is to do no maintenance at all, you should consider the following scenarios:

Drop in website performance: the most common problem when you don't perform WordPress maintenance is that the overall performance of your site drops. This is usually website speed, but can also include things like broken links and contact form errors. This usually affects your Google search rankings and your overall bounce rate.

Website gets hacked: Something that happens quite often depending on how long you go without any updates or security checks. Usually website owners never know when a website is hacked, the main goal is to push malicious or adult themed links to their website visitors. Finding out that you have been advertising drugs or adult products can be catastrophic for your business.

Website down: without monthly maintenance, a major update can bring your site down completely. This can be an easy fix or something that takes a developer days to figure out. However, the worst case scenario is a website going down.

All of the above scenarios will be much more expensive than dedicating resources to monthly maintenance or paying an agency to professionally maintain your website. If you are going to call several agencies, here are six key questions to ask before signing up for maintenance.

Looking for a team to take care of your WordPress maintenance needs? Get in touch!