Do you have a WordPress maintenance plan? What do you do exactly? Just updates or also a bit of SEO? You need to understand why you need a WordPress maintenance plan.
Many website owners are not paying enough attention to their WordPress website.
Some of these websites aren’t updated for months or even years. This could be a threat to your website, and it’s security.
In this post, we explain the essential elements in a WordPress maintenance plan.
Updates
WordPress core updates
The WordPress core is with 74 per cent by far the most vulnerable compartment, especially older not updates versions.
A maintenance plan needs to include regular updates for your WordPress core to ensure your website is functional, stable and easy to navigate.
WordPress theme and plugin updates
The next biggest causes of vulnerabilities are WordPress plugins and themes. Every WordPress maintenance service should be focussing on these updates to prevent security breaches.
Inactive plugins should be deleted because they are potential risks, take up space and affects your speed and performance.
Backups
A regular backup plan is just as important as updating your website. Reverting to an old version of your site makes you lose data.
We advise you to go for a daily off-site backup plan. Off-site means the backup isn’t on the same server as the website to ensure you always have a backup.
Security & uptime monitoring
While technology gets smarter, hackers also get smarter. A good hacker could destroy a website in a couple of minutes.
Checking up once a week on your website isn’t enough. It would be best if you had security and uptime monitoring running 24/7.
What if my website gets a virus or malware?
In this case, your plan should be accountable for hack cleanup and malware removal.
They must find out how this could happen and make sure it can’t happen in the future anymore.
Performance & speed optimization
This is not essential to a maintenance plan, but it adds a lot more value to it.
After all, the performance affects the user experience and ranking of your website.
You can measure and improve your page speed for free with Google’s page speed insights.
How will the performance be optimized?
There are a lot of aspects that can influence your site performance like:
- web hosting
- WordPress theme
- image sizes
- Javascript and CSS files
- caching
- CDN
- gzip compression
- WordPress database
- external scripts
Reporting
Every good maintenance plan provides their clients with weekly/monthly reports with all insights about their website. This gives the website owner an overview of what happened to the site.
Collecting these reports could be useful to give future developer insights into the website as well.
