WordPress Website Maintenance: The What, Why, How & When of Proper Maintenance

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But that would be a major mistake. You can’t get complacent because your WordPress site needs regular care to protect your investment, improve your search rankings, and keep people visiting and investing in your business!

Regular care translates into daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly WordPress website maintenance – a set of routine tasks that keep your site secure, accessible, and efficient.

That covers a lot of ground – so, in this guide, we explore:

• What regular WordPress website maintenance should include, and why it’s pivotal
• How to get started
• When to schedule tasks for the best results
• How much outsourcing WordPress maintenance costs, and why it offers the best value

What Is WordPress Website Maintenance?

WordPress website maintenance is the set of regular checks and changes you make to ensure your site is secure, runs smoothly, and is optimized for users’ experience. It includes:

• Keeping WordPress is up to date
• Fixing broken links
• Backing up your website
• Simplifying site navigation
• Protecting against hacking with security tools
• Ensuring your content is relevant to your readers

Many of these tasks apply to general website maintenance, but there are a few WordPress-specific tasks you should follow to make WP maintenance even more effective.

We cover the key elements of a WordPress-specific maintenance plan later on in this guide.

Why Does WordPress Maintenance Matter?

Maintaining your WordPress site keeps it performing at its best, giving visitors an accessible, insightful, and relevant experience. All of this keeps them on the site (and coming back), driving leads and revenue for your business.

Let’s break down four common questions about website maintenance for WordPress to help you understand the value of maintaining a site.

“Do I really need to secure my WordPress site?”

Yes! WordPress is a secure platform as-is, but that doesn’t mean leaving it to its own devices is safe. Research shows that almost 6,000 new vulnerabilities were found in WP between 2022 and 2023.

Essentially, WordPress’s open-source build is a blessing and a curse:

• A blessing because it’s so flexible, accessible, and scalable
• A curse because it means hackers can easily exploit outdated WP versions, sneak in, and wreak havoc

Without keeping up on maintenance, you put your users, reputation, and bottom line at risk.

“Why should I care about what my users think of my site?”

You can’t just upload your content and expect everyone to love it. Your WordPress site must have a strong UX (user experience) strategy.

Around 43% of consumers believe poor experiences are enough to make them walk away, and websites play a huge part. Maintaining an attractive, accessible website means your visitors and customers are more likely to find what they need, buy from you, and return for more.

“Why should I worry about SEO?”

Despite the changes Google has made to search algorithms over the years, following and adjusting search engine optimization strategies still helps your website get seen by the right people.

But it’s not a set-it-and-leave-it process. It’s a rolling checklist you must return to as demands change. It could take up to a year for a strong SEO strategy to genuinely drive positive results.

Check out our complete website maintenance and SEO guide for how to bolster your search engine rankings.

“Is maintaining a WordPress site cost-effective?”

Provided you take the right steps regularly enough, yes. We cover some of the costs you might expect a little further on.

Maintaining your WordPress site drives long-lasting performance, boosting your initial investment’s ROI. It also encourages repeat visits (and purchases) from customers and protects your brand, services, and reputation from attacks and data leaks.

Not investing in your website regularly means that sooner or later, it’s doomed to fail. Much like neglecting your car, you can’t expect it to work like new forever!

Look at our guide on the WordPress website maintenance costs for more insight into how much money you could save.

How To Maintain Your WordPress Website: 6 Key Tasks

There are six key tasks you should set yourself regularly to ensure your WordPress website is healthy and working hard to attract and keep customers.

Before running any checks, you should always put your website in WordPress maintenance mode. This lets you make changes without disrupting users’ experience. Or even better – if your hosting provider supports it – run a staging site and make changes there before you go live.

Regardless of how you prepare, remember these steps for a successful WordPress website maintenance plan:

1. Update everything

By everything, we mean your WordPress core files, plugins, and themes.

Staying on top of core updates for WordPress is one of the most effective ways of stopping attackers from exploiting your website. It also helps to keep your website accessible and supports your activity behind the scenes.

The easiest way to cover this step is to turn on automatic updates for WordPress. However, we don’t recommend this because it can lead to unexpected errors that take time and energy to resolve. The best choice is to ask an expert to run manual updates after having checked compatibility.

You can also check for yourself by looking if there are new versions available under the “Updates” tab at the top-left of your WP dashboard:

2. Back up your site

Backing up your site means saving local copies of your content to reload later.

This can be useful if, for example, you make changes to your WordPress site and you make a mistake and need to roll it back, if you experience a common WordPress error, or if you’re hacked.

In many cases, website hosting services offer backup functions through their user portals. However, if you prefer to run your own regular backups, you could use a plugin such as UpdraftPlus:

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On that note, we always recommend setting up automated backups. Doing so means you don’t have to remember to save manually, and if the worst-case scenario happens, you can just reload. While daily backups aren’t necessary, you should aim to backup at least once a week.

3. Secure your site

Securing your WordPress site is a crucial step of any maintenance routine. Here’s a quick cheat sheet of the steps we recommend:

• Stay on top of site, theme, and plugin updates
• Use strong passwords
• Register with a reliable web host
• Back up your site on a regular basis
• Install and run regular scans with a security plugin (e.g., Sucuri)
• Set up a web application firewall

This is just the setup, though. Maintaining your WordPress security means keeping on top of updates, refreshing your passwords, ensuring only people you trust have admin access – the list goes on.

It also means looking out for errors and fixing them fast. If you’re unsure how to manage this on your own, consider how Lamano Law tackled the problem.

This law firm turned to StateWP to help manage its WordPress presence, and it’s now easy for the firm to report bugs when they arise with our dev team through the Proto dashboard. Doing so gave its site a significant security and performance boost, and its team feels better protected with experts on call.

With WordPress threats ever-evolving, it’s never wise to assume your site’s safe enough to just leave to fend for itself.

So, let’s steer you in the right direction – read our guide to the most common WordPress security issues to learn more about what’s at stake.

4. Check and refresh your content

Checking and refreshing your content means ensuring it’s still relevant for readers and up-to-date with the latest keywords.

Content updates keep your site ranking highly on Google, per its “Helpful Content” policy. That means you need to ensure your content is authoritative, interesting, and genuinely valuable to your readers.

It’s a pretty big deal. Google has erased 45% of “unhelpful” content from search results since 2022!

You could audit your content by looking through old blog topics, for example, and updating them with fresh links and keywords to keep them ranking well.

Also, look for broken links and 404 errors across your site, which can occur if, for example, you move some content without considering where it was previously linked.

5. Optimize speed and performance

Slow sites turn visitors away fast – a B2B website with a loading time of just one second has triple the conversion rate of one that loads within five. You need to keep a close eye on your site to ensure it isn’t dropping frequently for visitors!

To improve your WordPress speed and performance, we recommend:

• Regularly checking speed tools such as GTMetrix
• Reducing the number of images, videos, and plugins you use
• Using lazy loading techniques
• Running light or minimalist themes
• Working with a dedicated server via a reputable host (such as WP Engine)
• Using plugins such as UptimeRobot to report downtime issues

Our guide to speeding up WordPress sites gives you a checklist to work through during your regular maintenance tasks.

6. Focus on UX/UI

Research shows that most people leave websites if they’re slow and hard to navigate – but even as many as 38.5% of visitors simply click away if a site design’s outdated. You’ll want to make your WordPress content as user-friendly and attractive as possible.

For example, you could:

• Check how your site performs on mobile (e.g., using Google Analytics 4)
• Use WordPress themes that are accessible and not too cluttered
• Test your site after updating plugins to ensure it’s error-free
• Tag content appropriately so users can find it easily
• Test your web forms (and use highly rated plugins like Gravity Forms or Contact Form 7)
• Use a reliable WordPress checkout plugin, like WooCommerce, and test regularly
• Insert new links across old content to connect your site
• Use a plugin like Query Monitor to flag technical issues that could hinder a positive user experience
• Focus on making calls to action simple and obvious

That’s a lot to consider, and it’s not even a comprehensive list. It’s partly why companies such as Heffernan Insurance Brokers turn to StateWP to help upgrade its WordPress design.

Our team revitalized the company’s site with a simpler navigation system and a mobile-friendly design. We even made it easier for the team to manage its content, too.

If you want to manage the above on your own, always use website analytics to learn more about your visitors’ behavior, and tailor settings accordingly.

When Should You Maintain Your WordPress Website?

Some WordPress maintenance tasks should be performed once a day, while others might only need yearly audits.

It’s also important to check and update your website whenever Google changes its algorithms. And, of course, if you’re experiencing customer complaints about your site, it’s time to get investigating.

Here’s how we suggest splitting up routine maintenance tasks into different schedules:

Daily Tasks

1. Run security updates and malware scans (e.g., with the Sucuri plugin)
2. Check page speeds (e.g., with GTMetrix)
3. Check site uptime (e.g., with UptimeRobot)

Weekly Tasks

1. Check and test web forms and plugins
2. Update and test WordPress, plugins, and theme files
3. Back up your data in WordPress or via host
4. Moderate your post and page comments
5. Check for analytics errors (and use the Query Monitor plugin to check general errors)
6. Test-drive your website on different devices

Monthly Tasks

1. Publish insightful, helpful content
2. Check website visitor statistics via analytics
3. Check SEO statistics (e.g., with the Yoast plugin)
4. Adjust and develop your content plan
5. Check for broken links and 404 errors (e.g., with the Broken Link Checker plugin)
6. Check and test checkout functions (e.g., with WooCommerce)
7. Manage any marketing automation
8. Check and adjust landing pages and keywords

Quarterly Tasks

1. Change all WordPress passwords and check user permissions
2. Check security licenses and premium plugins for updates

Yearly Tasks

1. Review your “About Us” page
2. Check and update website visuals (e.g., edit your WordPress theme or choose an alternative one)
3. Check and update your pages’ and posts’ meta titles and descriptions
4. Update your footers via the WordPress dashboard
5. Check your domain and host renewal
6. Audit your content and create new landing pages

As you can see – it’s a lot of work that requires plenty of technical expertise! If you’re tackling it alone, here’s a downloadable maintenance checklist:

So, How Much Does WordPress Website Maintenance Cost?

WordPress website maintenance costs depend on how much you’re willing to do yourself and how much you’d like to outsource!

The key question is: Should you hire a freelance expert or an agency? Which works out the best value for money? Let’s find out.

Freelance WordPress experts

Freelancers charge anywhere from $30-$100 per hour.

They’re an ideal choice if you:

• Need a specialized skillset to complement your in-house team
• Have a smaller scope of required work
• Just want to delegate a task without hiring an entire agency

Hiring a freelance WordPress expert can be a great option for smaller and medium-sized business owners with a one-off idea or a smaller scope of work.

However, this can be a double-edged sword.

It can be more affordable, but you get exactly what you pay for – nothing extra. It can also actually be more expensive in the long run, as you only pay one person by the hour, not an entire team through better-value WordPress website maintenance packages.

The other thing to think about here is scaling. One person can only do so much so quickly, so you might find yourself short-staffed.

Web design and development agencies

Agencies charge between $100 and $2,000 per month.

Full disclosure: This is us! Pricing for StateWP WordPress website maintenance packages​ starts from $99 per month, billed annually, at the Starter tier.

Web design and development agencies can take care of virtually anything you need for your site and its ongoing maintenance.

They handle large-scale projects as quickly as smaller ones because they always have a specialized team on the trigger, meaning:

• Enterprises with huge to-do lists and impossible-looking requirements benefit from custom packages
• Businesses of all sizes find long-term and easily-scalable support
• Support extends to other platforms, like WooCommerce

That said, this level of care is not the cheapest option, but it does offer total peace of mind.

Web design agencies are great for small to medium companies needing regular help and proper maintenance on demand.

Take our client, Forward Vision, a full-service marketing agency. Bogged down with reporting blindness and poor maintenance support, the firm turned to StateWP for proactive monitoring and client site performance enhancement. The team now benefits from supportive expertise delivering on clients’ maintenance needs around the clock.

The Best Choice for WordPress Website Maintenance: Outsource to an Experienced WP Agency

While it’s always worth running regular website health checks of your own, help is always at hand. Partnering with an experienced WordPress agency to maintain and manage your site makes sense from every possible angle.

With experienced developers, there’s always someone trustworthy and capable keeping an eye on all your site’s moving parts. Plus, there’s no need for you to learn how to maintain it all yourself.

Consider the time and cost-saving benefits, too. Any time you spend not running your business could be serious revenue lost.

With a WP agency, you can funnel all of your creative time into boosting your bottom line, safe in the knowledge it’s always ticking over as your visitors expect.

In fact, with many WP agencies, you can get started with an audit for free. For example, you can reach out to StateWP for a quick, no-obligation consultation, and let us show you why and how WordPress maintenance is so important.

But don’t just take our word for it. Emma Wollenweber, Marketing Manager at Sun Pacific, is thrilled not only with how StateWP has improved her sites’ performance and structure but also with the plain-speaking IT helpdesk she has on standby.

After partnering with us, the client’s sites now have 25% faster load times with a GTMetrix performance score boost of 21%. Emma and her team have direct access to expert developer help whenever they need it, too.

“Just the ability to communicate with the person managing our website is HUGE. My strength as a marketer is having the audacity to ask what’s going on, and StateWP enables me to do that.”
– Emma Wollenweber

Take WordPress Website Maintenance Seriously (with a Little Help from the Experts)

You need to invest in regular WordPress website maintenance to keep your business competing ahead of the curve. That can mean daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly checks.

Managing your content, updating your visuals, securing your site, and performing updates all sounds easy enough. Altogether, though, it’s a lot of time and effort.

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That’s why investing in a WordPress maintenance service provider with an expert team like StateWP is such a sound decision. We keep your site ticking over and scaling up to support your business’s growth long-term, and we knock out any errors that pop up in no time.

Don’t just set up your website and leave it to fend for itself – Contact us now and let us assess your basic maintenance needs for free.

WordPress Website Maintenance: FAQs

Let’s close this guide with some common questions and answers.