WordPress Maintenance Checklist
Essential Tasks to Keep Your Site Healthy
Is your WordPress Website costing you customers? A slow, broken, or out of date site can drive away visitors instead of engaging them. Keeping your WordPress website maintained, secure, and up to date benefits your site users and your business too, but how do you get started with a WordPress website maintenance practice? With our free WordPress maintenance checklist of course!
The Web Atrium has years of experience maintaining and developing performant and accessible wordpress websites for our clients. We know the WordPress site maintenance tasks inside out, and have consolidated them into an invaluable reference for you. Don’t let poor maintenance cost you customers!
WordPress Maintenance Checklist overview
How often should you update WordPress? We recommend checking for updates once per month. WordPress core, and third party plugins and themes get updated regularly and it is smart to keep on top of the task and protect your investment.
Top 3 Monthly WordPress Security Updates
We consider these maintenance tasks to be the minimum requirement for an updated WordPress installation, and are part of our WordPress maintenance services that we provide for our clients. If done regularly, this process can usually be completed within an hour, and is an essential add to your WordPress maintenance schedule.
Hint: All of the Monthly WordPress Maintenance Tasks in this list can be updated by clicking a button in the wordpress dashboard!
1. Check for WordPress Plugin security updates
Plugins add to the codebase of your website, and outdated or insecure plugin code can put your site at risk. If you’re not sure if you should update your plugins to the new versions, there is a link to see what changes are included. Testing the updated plugin in a development environment before updating the code on your live site is recommended practice, as large updates can affect content that depends on them.
2. Check for Theme security updates
Themes require updating less often. It is most important to update them when they have a security update available. If you have csutomized your theme files directly, you may find the updates will overwrite your changes. If you have a custom child theme, you can safely update the base theme and keep your customizations intact.
3. Check for WordPress core version security updates
‘Wordpress core’ refers to the entire installation of wordpress, excluding plugins, themes, and media uploads. It is important to keep your version of wordpress up to date, for security fixes and code version compatibility.
WordPress Site Performance & User Experience
These aspects are more apparent from the front end of the site, but might take a bit more time and effort to implement. Depending on your schedule, you could rotate between them each month to setup to-dos for your team.
1. Accessibility Audit
Even if your website is not legally required to be ADA compliant, it is a good idea to adhere to accessibility best practices. There are a number of evaluation tests to help generate a list of improvements to make, and we offer a Website Accessibility Audit service to help get you peace of mind.
2. Performance speedtest
If your website is slow to load, users might click away before htey see your great content. There are a number of evaluation tests to help determine if your site could use some help with performance.
3. Content Relevance Assessment
The best way to serve your customers is to have up to date and relevant content for them. If you have a blog or news section with dates on the articles, you can easily see if it’s time to write your next post. Review popular landing pages for timely content edits and confirm layout and placement of elements are most helpful for your users’ path through the site.
Monthly wordpress maintenance is a great schedule, every other month is the next best option
When security updates pile up, you could end up with code conflicts, malware, and a non-functioning website.
Yes, you can do the maintenance yourself in the admin dashboard. If you have a wordpress backup plugin installed you can backup your database and files before you do anything and restore when you need to.
