Is it Time for WordPress Maintenance?

WordPress is an open-source CMS with an enormous community of contributors who are working to improve the platform. That alongside over 55,000 Plugins in the WordPress Repository means that regular updates are required to keep your WordPress site up to scratch.

Without updates, your WordPress website could certainly appear to be working as normal without any concerns. Some might even think, why fix it if it’s not broken? With that, let’s break down why WordPress Maintenance is critical.

Security

First and foremost, security should be the primary reason why you keep your websites up to date. Even with the rigorous testing of teams involved with plugins/themes and contributing to WP core - Still, some bugs and security issues can raise their heads months later.

If your website hasn’t been updated in over six months, it’s very likely a plugin or theme has a well-known security gap at that point. Hackers can deploy bots to crawl the web scanning for out of date WordPress websites. Once they hit those websites, they attack. They can steal your data, completely deface your site, and more.

Bug-Free WordPress Website

A huge benefit of keeping your WordPress site up to date is that it should keep it free from any bugs. You can rest easy knowing that it’s unlikely any “random” bugs will come to disturb your workday. And it keeps your WordPress site always using best practices within the industry.

Faster WordPress & New Features

WordPress core, plugin, and theme updates often come with cool new features and performance upgrades. The developers are not only adding security patches. They are also implementing new features as well as improving the performance and speed of their code.

By keeping up with the changelogs, you can play around with these new features. For example, major WordPress Core updates always come with something new and shiny to use. As of WordPress 5.5, the CMS can now automatically update its plugins and themes. While this is awesome, there are some caveats in that, they might result in format or functions breaking on the website. In those cases a manual visual check of the site would be required soon after the auto update completes.

With any website, speed is crucial. I’m sure you’ve all heard how page speed above 3 seconds can massively reduce your conversion rates. Well, this is where regular updates can help. Each update can potentially increase page speed, even by a minor amount. But those milliseconds really matter in the greater scheme of things.

WordPress Maintenance Best Practices

Before you start frantically updating your WordPress website, there are a few considerations to make.

• Whose website are you updating, yours or a client?
• Would maintenance mode or potential downtime result in loss of revenue?
• Does your client have strict uptime SLAs?
• Do you have backups?

Most importantly, this all boils down to a few decisions that need to be made before starting any maintenance duties. You will decide whether you’ll be updating on the live server, or utilizing a sandbox/staging area to perform these updates.

If it’s the case where you can update on the live server, then you should still identify the best time frame to do so. Usually, this is late at night or over the weekends. Whenever there is the least amount of traffic on the website. If the website is accepting payments or user data, maintenance mode should be enabled before you begin. This prevents any lingering users on the site from having a negative experience. You should also have a fresh backup to restore to in case of critical error.

Otherwise, you’re going to want to either copy the site over to a staging environment or over to a local sandbox environment. In cases where uptime is vital to the success of the business, then all updates should be performed and well tested before deploying back over to the live server.

Last but not least, when you find an issue. It’s likely the same problem could be affecting others in the WordPress community. Before you start hacking into the code, search for the same error or plugin update online. Someone else might have already provided the solution. Or find out if the plugin developer plans on releasing any patches for it. This small step can save you a lot of time and effort.

WordPress Maintenance is essential when managing any sites built with this CMS. To keep your website performant, secured, and bug-free make sure to update often. Set some time away each month to make these necessary updates. You’ll thank yourself for it later.

Need someone to give you a hand with your WordPress maintenance needs? We have over 250 WordPress experts in our network, pre-screened and vetted to save you extra time. Get in touch with us by filling out the form below!