WordPress is an ever changing environment as the members of its core development team are constantly working on new updates, fixing bugs, and introducing new features.
Failing to keep your WordPress site up to date can cause it to underperform on search engines and expose it to severe security threats.
The changes you make to your website, such as publishing new blog posts or creating a new form, can also clutter your site’s database and cause a myriad of performance issues.
WordPress maintenance is a mandatory step you must take to avoid compromising your site’s safety and dragging its loading speed down.
We’ve compiled a WordPress maintenance checklist to help you keep your website running smoothly and estimate how much time you’ll need to perform these tasks in 2024.
The Benefits of Regular WordPress Website Maintenance
Your site’s success depends on a broad spectrum of factors. Some of these factors are beyond your control, so the best thing to do is focus on the WordPress site management aspects you can control.
Besides ensuring that all content you publish on your website is high-quality, you should also dedicate time or resources to the site’s maintenance.
Finding the time to perform each maintenance task on your own is tricky, considering how demanding running a website can be. That’s why digital agencies offer WordPress maintenance care plans to companies that don’t have enough time to perform these tasks on their own.
White label WordPress maintenance can reduce the workload your in-house team has to carry and prevent software-related issues. Moreover, a comprehensive WordPress website maintenance package usually includes tasks performed weekly, monthly, or annually.
Let’s go through some of the benefits of regular WordPress website maintenance:
- Higher conversion rates – A well-maintained website will likely attract a high organic traffic volume. Hence, your conversion rates will go up as a result of regular maintenance.
- Monitoring website performance – Getting a white label WordPress maintenance care plan will enable you to monitor your site’s performance monthly, quarterly, or yearly.
- Improved website safety – Using outdated WordPress themes and plugins or unsecure login forms are among the safety hazards you can avoid by getting a WordPress website maintenance package.
- Setting Your Business Up for Success – A malfunctioning website that doesn’t offer a good user experience to its visitors can only hurt your company’s chances of success. On the other hand, performing WordPress website maintenance frequently will address vital issues and ensure your business’s growth.
Scope and Complexity of WordPress Maintenance Tasks
Estimating how much time you’ll have to dedicate to WordPress maintenance in 2024 is difficult because there are too many factors you must consider to determine the scope of work you have to undertake.
Still, it’s safe to assume that you’ll have to perform some maintenance tasks weekly if you’re running a large WordPress website with tens of thousands of monthly visitors.
The number of plugins you’re using, the frequency of content publishing, and significant changes in the site’s design are also factors that might prompt you to perform specific maintenance tasks weekly or biweekly.
Performing a single maintenance task, like updating the plugins you’re using, isn’t time-consuming. However, the scope of maintenance work can be overwhelming if your site needs regular manual backups or constant comment moderation.
Broadly speaking, all WordPress maintenance tasks fall into one of the following categories:
- Weekly – Software updates, frontend inspection, spam comment removal, etc.
- Monthly – Site safety evaluation, database optimization, detection of broken links, etc.
- Annual – Changing hosting providers, content audits, updating passwords, etc.
Key Things to Consider Before Performing WordPress Maintenance
Performing random website maintenance tasks is unlikely to have the desired impact on its performance.
So, it’s necessary to determine which maintenance tasks your site needs to run smoothly since a maintenance task like deleting spam comments, which is vital for sites that allow visitors to comment on posts, can be unnecessary for websites with disabled comments.
Your WordPress website care plan should include the services you need to provide the best possible experience to its visitors and maximize the sales of your products.
Maintenance tasks like database optimization or software updates are universal because all WordPress sites, regardless of their size, can benefit from using the latest WordPress or plugin version and deleting unnecessary files from the database.
In addition, you’ll have to decide whether you want to handle the maintenance of your site manually or if you would like to outsource it to a white label WordPress maintenance agency.
Selection Criteria
We utilized the following criteria to compile the WordPress maintenance checklist:
- The task’s importance – Our checklist contains essential WordPress maintenance tasks that benefit most websites.
- Applicability – Each WordPress website has its own needs, and we relied on this criterion to select maintenance tasks that are applicable to WordPress websites regardless of their size or niche.
- Task’s scope and complexity – Some maintenance tasks on our checklist are highly technical and can take hours, while others take only a few minutes to complete.
The WordPress Maintenance Checklist
1. Site’s Frontend Inspection and Backups
Getting lost in all the tasks you must perform on your site’s backend is more common than you might think. Still, this shouldn’t distract you from checking how your site’s frontend looks.
Doing so will give you insight into the experience your site’s visitors have when they land on one of its pages and enable you to check if all the site’s features are working as intended.
Even though almost all WordPress hosts include automatic site backups in their plans, it’s still advisable to occasionally check if those backups are working properly.
You should also consider backing up your website manually a few times per year to ensure you have a site version you can revert to if your site crashes.
2. Spam Comment Moderation
Enabling comments on your website is a simple and efficient way to increase user engagement. Even so, spam comments can affect the credibility of discussions your site’s visitors are having and its search rankings.
Moderating comments and filtering out all comments left by spambots is a routine maintenance task you must perform weekly.
Aside from creating a trustworthy platform for your site’s visitors to debate important topics, moderating comments can also help you get feedback from the site’s users.
You can approve and manage comments from the WordPress dashboard or install a plugin like Zero Spam for WordPress or Akismet that performs this task automatically.
Still, you should check the comments these plugins flag as spam weekly to ensure that authentic comments are approved.
3. Updating WordPress Core Files and Plugins
Ensuring that your website is running on the latest WordPress version is one of the most critical maintenance tasks you must perform to ensure that all its features are functioning normally.
You’ll receive a notification from WordPress whenever a new release or a minor update becomes available, so you just have to click a button to install the latest WordPress version.
Besides updating the WordPress core files, you must keep the theme and plugins you’re using on your site up to date.
The scope of maintenance work you’ll have to undertake to keep your website up to date depends on how many plugins you’re using. Checking for new plugin updates weekly should be enough to avoid any software-related issues on your site.
Optionally, you can set up a staging environment for your WordPress site if you want to test each update before using it on your site’s live version.
4. Testing All Website’s Forms
A malfunctioning checkout form can be why your online business is losing revenue.
That’s why checking if all forms that are essential to your business are working is paramount to ensure your site’s visitors can purchase the products you’re offering or subscribe to your newsletter.
In addition, you should also regularly check if all other features, such as CTA buttons or the sitemap, are working.
Don’t forget to monitor all transactions that take place on your WordPress site to ensure your target audience can shop safely and detect any irregularities that could cause your site’s visitors to lose money.
5. WordPress Database Optimization
Whenever you publish a new post, create a product page, change a WordPress theme, or install a new plugin, you add more files to your site’s database.
All this data occupies server space, and if it’s not removed regularly, it can slow down your website.
The purpose of WordPress database optimization is to remove all redundant files, such as plugins you’re no longer using or old media files.
Going through this process manually is time-consuming, and most WordPress website admins utilize plugins like WP-Optimize or WP-Sweep to automatically remove transients, auto drafts, and other types of redundant data.
6. Detecting and Removing Broken Links
Your site’s SEO strategy is incomplete without backlinking because adding links to content on authoritative sites improves your website’s trustworthiness.
However, the admins of the websites you link to might delete that page or change its URL, so you can easily end up with broken links that show your site’s visitor 404 errors.
You’ll need Google Search Console or a WordPress Broken Link Checker if you want to perform this maintenance task yourself. Also, you should check if the white label WordPress care plan you’re interested in includes the detection and removal of broken links from your website.
7. Testing and Improving Site’s Loading Speeds
Keeping your site’s loading speeds fast significantly impacts its performance on search engines, organic traffic rates, and other parameters.
Conducting a monthly performance test will help you improve the site’s Core Web Vitals, check the size of individual pages, or find out how long an HTTP request takes.
Interpreting the results of a website speed test and understanding how to use them to boost your site’s performance is arguably the most challenging part of the process.
Outsourcing this maintenance task to a white label WordPress agency can be a good decision if your company doesn’t have the technical knowledge or resources to manage it internally.
8. Analyze the Metrics
Tracking your site’s organic traffic, conversion rates, and other metrics is a useful vehicle for determining which of your site’s pages are underperforming.
Tools like Google Analytics can help you identify the pages that don’t attract high numbers of visitors or spot patterns that suggest some area of your site needs improvement.
Although analyzing the site’s metrics won’t reveal the issues that are halting its growth, these stats can be an indication that some of the site’s technical aspects need tweaking.
For instance, your site’s loading speed might be too slow if your site’s bounce rates are consistently high.
Also, Google Analytics’ Devices metrics can help you find out if your site needs further optimization for mobile devices if the number of users who visit your WordPress website from smartphones is low.
9. Content SEO Optimization
Incorporating the best SEO practices into your content strategy early will save you a lot of time on website maintenance down the line.
Resizing the images you add to your blog posts, changing keywords, or rewriting video meta descriptions would be unnecessary if you optimize all content for search engines before you publish it.
Conducting annual SEO content audits is still advisable even if you’re maintaining high SEO standards across your WordPress site, as it can help you detect duplicate pages or remove content that is no longer relevant.
10. Evaluate Website’s Security
Malware scans, avoiding phishing scams, and finding backdoors on your WordPress website are only a handful of the countless benefits of performing regular security checks.
Tightening your site’s security requires more than obtaining an SSL certificate since outdated plugins, theme files, and low-quality hosting can affect your site’s safety.
If you run a website with multiple authors and contributors, consider updating all passwords or installing a plugin that enables you to monitor user activity.
A security scan can take anywhere from twenty minutes to more than four hours, depending on the site’s size, bandwidth, and other factors. Ideally, you should perform this WordPress maintenance task several times a year.
11. Consider Migrating Your Website to a New Hosting Provider
This is by no means a mandatory website maintenance task. Still, occasionally evaluating your site’s hosting service can help you determine if the plan you’re currently using offers everything your website needs.
Consider migrating your website to a new host if you’re running out of server space, frequently experience security issues, or if your site is slow, even though you’ve done everything possible to ensure that each page loads quickly.
Upgrading to a plan with more server space, higher bandwidths, and malware-scanning features is also an option if you don’t want to go through the WordPress website migration process.
Frequently Asked Questions About WordPress Website Maintenance
How Much Does White Label WordPress Maintenance Service Cost?
A white label WordPress care plan can cost between $50 and over a thousand dollars depending on the number of websites and the services included in the plan.
Do I Need a Staging Site to Perform WordPress Maintenance Tasks?
Creating a staging site ensures that performing different maintenance tasks won’t slow down your site’s live version. However, you can switch to WordPress maintenance mode to avoid lowering your site’s speed while optimizing images.
How Long Does WordPress Site Maintenance Take?
Daily or weekly maintenance checks usually don’t last more than half an hour, while some monthly and annual maintenance tasks can take several hours to complete.
The Importance of Compiling Your WordPress Maintenance Checklist
Building a site that attracts lots of organic traffic and has high conversion rates takes dedicated effort, as you must juggle between supplying a steady stream of fresh content, making sure the payment gateway is working at all times, and countless other tasks.
It’s easy to overlook the importance of frequent WordPress maintenance checks in such a busy environment.
Compiling a WordPress maintenance checklist provides a simple solution to this problem because it gives you an overview of tasks you must perform weekly, monthly, and annually.
A checklist can also be useful while choosing a white label WordPress care plan, as it can help you select a plan that includes all services your website needs to perform at the highest level.
