What a WordPress maintenance plan should include
Weekly, monthly and quarterly tasks, and six questions to ask before you pay anyone to look after your site.
WordPress powers a large share of business websites because it's flexible and easy to edit. The trade-off is that it needs looking after. Plugins update, PHP versions retire, and a form that worked in January can quietly stop sending in June. Here's what regular maintenance should cover, whoever does it.
Why sites break
Most problems we're called in for come from three causes: updates applied straight to the live site without testing, backups that were never checked, and plugins nobody uses anymore but nobody removed. Each one is cheap to prevent and expensive to fix after the fact.
The maintenance schedule
| How often | Task |
|---|---|
| Every day | Automatic off-site backup; uptime check every few minutes |
| Every week | Core, theme and plugin updates, tested on a staging copy first |
| Every month | Send a test inquiry and, for stores, a test order; check Search Console for errors; review admin accounts; remove unused plugins |
| Every quarter | Restore a backup to staging to prove it works; check the PHP version; speed check on a phone |
| Every year | Confirm domain and SSL renewals; review hosting plan and costs |
Backups you can restore
A backup only counts if you can restore it. Look for three things:
- Off-site. Stored somewhere other than the same server as the website, so a server problem doesn't take both.
- Kept long enough. At least 30 days, so you can go back to before a problem started, not just to yesterday.
- Tested. Someone restores a copy to a staging site every few months and checks it works.
Security basics take ten minutes: turn on two-factor login for every admin, give staff the lowest role they need, and delete accounts for people who've left.
Questions to ask a provider
- Do you test updates on a staging copy before applying them live?
- Where are backups stored, how long are they kept, and when did you last test a restore?
- How quickly do you respond if the site goes down, and is that cleanup included?
- Will I get a report each month showing what was done?
- Are content edits included, and how many hours?
- If I leave, do I keep every login and backup?
Our care plans cover all of the above, every month, with a one-page report. If your site needs more than maintenance, start with a WordPress audit.
