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A boutique hotel chain in Savannah hired me through Upwork last October to figure out why their booking system had stopped working. Guests were filling out reservation forms that never reached the front desk. The issue took me eight minutes to find: a plugin conflict caused by an unattended update. Contact Form 7 had auto-updated to a version incompatible with their booking integration plugin, which hadn’t been updated in nine months. The booking form silently broke. No error messages. No notifications. For 11 days, potential guests submitted reservations into a void. The hotel estimated $14,000 in lost bookings before they noticed. All of it preventable with a 20-minute monthly maintenance check.
WordPress maintenance isn’t glamorous. Nobody gets excited about updating plugins and checking backup logs. But neglecting it is the single most common reason WordPress sites break, get hacked, slow down, and lose rankings. This checklist covers every task I perform across 400+ client sites, organized by frequency so you know exactly what to do and when.
Why WordPress Maintenance Matters
WordPress powers 43% of the web, which makes it the biggest target for automated attacks. Outdated plugins account for roughly 52% of all WordPress vulnerabilities. An unmaintained site doesn’t just risk getting hacked. It risks slow page loads that hurt Core Web Vitals, broken functionality that frustrates visitors, SEO degradation from crawl errors and broken links, and hosting account suspension if malware spreads to shared resources. A properly maintained WordPress site runs for years without major issues. An unmaintained site is a ticking clock.
Weekly Tasks (15 Minutes)
Check for plugin and theme updates. Log into wp-admin, navigate to Dashboard → Updates, and review what’s available. Don’t click “Update All” blindly. Read the changelogs. Look for major version jumps (2.x to 3.x) which often include breaking changes. Update one plugin at a time on production sites and verify functionality after each. If you have a staging environment through your hosting provider, test updates there first. Plugins I always update immediately: security plugins (Wordfence, Sucuri), RankMath or Yoast, and caching plugins (WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache). These affect security and SEO directly.
Review uptime and site health. Check your uptime monitoring tool (UptimeRobot free tier works fine) for any downtime events in the past week. Log into WordPress and check Dashboard → Site Health for any critical issues flagged by WordPress core. Address anything marked “Critical” immediately. “Recommended” items can wait for your monthly check.
Verify backup completion. Whether you use UpdraftPlus, BlogVault, or your hosting provider’s backup system, confirm that this week’s backup completed successfully. Don’t just assume it ran. Open the backup log, verify the timestamp, and confirm file size is consistent with previous backups. A backup that silently failed three weeks ago means you have no safety net.
Scan for malware. Run a quick scan through Wordfence or your security plugin. Check the scan log for any flagged files. Most weeks this will show nothing, which is exactly what you want. The one week you skip is inevitably the week something gets in. If you find malware, follow the complete recovery guide immediately.
Check Google Search Console. Open Search Console and look at the Coverage report for any new errors. Check for sudden drops in indexed pages, new crawl errors (404s, 500s, redirect loops), and any manual actions. This takes two minutes and catches technical SEO problems before they compound.
Monthly Tasks (45 Minutes)
WordPress core updates. Minor updates (6.4.1 to 6.4.2) are security patches and should be applied promptly. Major updates (6.4 to 6.5) require more caution. Check plugin compatibility announcements before updating. The WordPress core team maintains backward compatibility carefully, but themes and plugins don’t always keep pace. Always take a full backup before any core update.
Database optimization. WordPress databases accumulate overhead: post revisions, transient options, spam comments, trashed posts, and orphaned metadata. Use WP-Optimize or Advanced Database Cleaner to remove post revisions beyond the last 5, clear all transients, empty spam and trash, remove orphaned postmeta and commentmeta, and optimize database tables. A clean database directly improves admin panel speed and can reduce page generation time. On a client site running WooCommerce with 4,000+ orders, monthly database cleanup reduced average server response time from 1.8 seconds to 0.6 seconds.
Review and clean plugins. Deactivate and delete any plugin you’re not actively using. Every installed plugin, even deactivated ones, adds potential attack surface. Check for plugins that haven’t been updated by their developers in over 12 months and look for alternatives. Audit your active plugin list against actual functionality needs. I regularly find sites running 3 plugins that do the same thing (two SEO plugins, multiple caching solutions, redundant security tools). Lean plugin stacks mean faster sites and fewer conflicts. The speed optimization guide covers plugin audit in detail.
Test all forms and critical functionality. Submit every contact form on your site. Complete a test purchase if you run WooCommerce. Test booking systems, membership registration, login/logout flows, and any custom functionality. Verify that form submissions reach the correct email inbox. Check that autoresponder emails send correctly. Broken forms are invisible revenue leaks because visitors rarely report them. They just leave.
Check page speed. Run your homepage and top 3 landing pages through PageSpeed Insights. Compare scores against last month. If any page dropped more than 5 points, investigate what changed (new plugin, new content, theme update). Speed optimization isn’t a one-time fix. It’s an ongoing process because every new plugin, image, and content update can introduce performance regression.
Review security logs. Check your security plugin’s activity log for failed login attempts, file changes, blocked IPs, and any flagged events. Look for patterns: a spike in brute force attempts from specific IP ranges, unauthorized file modifications, or login attempts on admin accounts that don’t exist (a sign someone is probing your site). Adjust security rules as needed.
Update passwords and check user accounts. Review the Users section in wp-admin. Remove any accounts that shouldn’t exist. Verify that no user has Administrator access unless they genuinely need it. If you gave temporary access to a developer or content writer who’s finished, remove or downgrade their account. Check for user accounts you don’t recognize, which could indicate a compromise.
Quarterly Tasks (2 Hours)
Full SEO health check. Run a crawl with Screaming Frog (free for up to 500 URLs) or Sitebulb. Check for broken internal links (404 errors), redirect chains longer than 2 hops, missing meta descriptions, duplicate title tags, missing alt text on images, orphaned pages with no internal links pointing to them, and thin content pages under 300 words. Fix broken links and redirect chains immediately. Prioritize missing meta descriptions on high-traffic pages. This is a condensed version of the full SEO audit I perform for clients. My DIY SEO audit guide walks through the complete process.
Review and update content. Check your top 10 performing pages in Google Analytics. Are they still accurate? Do prices, service descriptions, team members, and contact information reflect your current business? Update any outdated statistics, screenshots, or references. Google rewards fresh, accurate content. A page that says “2024 pricing” in February 2026 tells both Google and visitors that the information may be unreliable.
Test backups with a restore. Having backups means nothing if they don’t work. Once per quarter, download your most recent backup and restore it to a staging environment or local installation. Verify that the site loads correctly with all content, images, and functionality intact. I’ve seen clients discover during an emergency that their backups were corrupt or incomplete. Testing quarterly eliminates that risk entirely.
SSL certificate verification. Most SSL certificates auto-renew through hosting providers, but verify that renewal happened successfully. Check your certificate expiration date (click the padlock icon in your browser). Test all pages for mixed content warnings (HTTP resources loading on HTTPS pages). An expired SSL certificate breaks trust signals for both visitors and Google.
PHP version check. Log into your hosting control panel and verify you’re running a supported PHP version. As of early 2026, PHP 8.2 and 8.3 are the recommended versions. PHP 8.0 reached end of life in November 2023. Running an unsupported PHP version means no security patches and potential compatibility issues with updated plugins. Before upgrading PHP, test on staging, as some older plugins break on newer PHP versions.
Annual Tasks (Half Day)
Comprehensive performance audit. Beyond monthly speed checks, an annual audit examines hosting performance under load, CDN configuration and cache hit rates, image optimization across every page (not just recent uploads), JavaScript and CSS delivery efficiency, server response time trends over the past 12 months, and Core Web Vitals trends in Search Console field data. This is where you decide if your hosting plan still fits your traffic or if it’s time to upgrade.
Full security audit. Change all administrative passwords. Regenerate WordPress security keys and salts in wp-config.php. Review file permissions (directories at 755, files at 644, wp-config.php at 400). Verify that directory listing is disabled, XML-RPC is blocked (unless specifically needed), and wp-admin is protected with additional authentication or IP restriction if possible. Check that your hosting account login, FTP/SFTP credentials, and database passwords are all strong and unique.
Hosting evaluation. Compare your current hosting performance and cost against alternatives. Hosting companies change pricing, add features, and adjust resources regularly. A hosting plan that was competitive 18 months ago may now cost more for less. Check server response time (TTFB), uptime percentage over the past year, support response quality, and whether your plan still matches your traffic and storage needs. I help clients evaluate hosting as part of my maintenance service.
Plugin and theme license renewals. Review all paid plugin and theme licenses. Cancel licenses for tools you no longer use. Renew licenses for tools that are critical. Check if better alternatives have emerged since you originally chose each tool. The WordPress ecosystem moves fast and a plugin that was the best option two years ago may have been surpassed.
Content strategy review. Analyze which blog posts drove the most organic traffic. Identify content gaps using Google Search Console’s query data (what are people searching for that you don’t have content for?). Plan the next 12 months of content. Update or consolidate underperforming posts. A content audit often reveals that 10-15% of your pages drive 80% of your traffic, and several pages may be cannibalizing each other for the same keywords.
Emergency Response Checklist
Keep this list bookmarked for when something goes wrong unexpectedly.
Site is down. Check hosting status page first (is it a server issue?). Clear all caches. Check .htaccess for corruption. Rename /plugins/ folder via FTP to rule out plugin crash. Contact hosting support with error details.
Site is hacked. Don’t panic. Follow the complete malware recovery guide. If you need same-day cleanup, my malware removal service handles it.
Sudden traffic drop. Check Google Search Console for manual actions or coverage errors. Review recent changes (did a plugin update break something?). Check robots.txt hasn’t been overwritten. Verify XML sitemap is accessible. Run the technical SEO checklist to find the issue.
White screen of death. Enable WP_DEBUG in wp-config.php to see the actual error. Usually caused by a plugin or theme conflict. Rename /plugins/ and /themes/your-theme/ folders via FTP to isolate the cause. Re-enable one at a time until the error returns.
Forms stopped working. Check the plugin for updates or conflicts. Test SMTP email delivery (WP Mail SMTP plugin helps diagnose). Verify form notification email addresses. Check spam folders. Test with a fresh form to rule out form-specific corruption.
Tools I Use for Maintenance
Security and monitoring. Wordfence (free version handles 90% of security needs), UptimeRobot (free uptime monitoring with email and Slack alerts), and Google Search Console (the most important free tool for any WordPress site).
Performance. WP Rocket (caching and optimization, worth every dollar), ShortPixel (image compression with WebP conversion), and PageSpeed Insights for testing.
Backups. UpdraftPlus for plugin-based backups or hosting-level backups through providers like Cloudways and Kinsta. Store backups in two locations minimum (cloud storage plus local or second cloud).
Database. WP-Optimize for routine cleanup. phpMyAdmin for manual queries when needed.
SEO. RankMath for on-site SEO management. Screaming Frog for crawl audits. Google Search Console for indexing and performance data.
The Maintenance Schedule at a Glance
Weekly (15 min): plugin/theme updates, uptime check, backup verification, malware scan, Search Console errors.
Monthly (45 min): core updates, database optimization, plugin audit, form testing, speed check, security log review, user account audit.
Quarterly (2 hrs): SEO crawl audit, content freshness review, backup restore test, SSL verification, PHP version check.
Annually (half day): full performance audit, security overhaul, hosting evaluation, license renewals, content strategy review.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does WordPress maintenance cost if I hire someone? Professional maintenance plans typically range from $50 to $200 per month depending on site complexity and service level. My maintenance plans include everything on this checklist plus priority support for issues. For most small business sites, $75-$100/month covers complete peace of mind.
What happens if I skip maintenance for 6 months? Plugin vulnerabilities accumulate (major security risk), database bloat slows the site, outdated PHP causes compatibility breaks, and SEO issues compound undetected. The recovery cost after 6 months of neglect is typically 5-10x more than 6 months of maintenance would have cost.
Can I automate WordPress maintenance? Partially. Auto-updates for minor WordPress core releases and trusted plugins reduce manual work. Automated backups and uptime monitoring run without intervention. But form testing, content review, security log analysis, and performance auditing require human judgment. The best approach is automated monitoring plus manual monthly checks.
Is managed WordPress hosting a replacement for maintenance? Managed hosts (Kinsta, WP Engine, Cloudways) handle server-level maintenance: updates to server software, automatic backups, security firewalls, and PHP management. They don’t handle plugin compatibility testing, form verification, content updates, SEO monitoring, or database cleanup. Managed hosting reduces maintenance burden by roughly 30-40% but doesn’t eliminate it.
How do I know if my site needs professional maintenance help? If your site generates revenue (leads, sales, bookings), if downtime would cost you money, if you don’t have time for monthly checks, or if you’re running WooCommerce with real transactions, professional maintenance is worth the investment. An SEO audit can reveal how much maintenance debt has already accumulated.
Keep Your WordPress Site Running Smoothly
Maintenance is the difference between a WordPress site that works reliably for years and one that becomes a liability. The checklist above covers everything, but if you’d rather have an expert handle it, my WordPress maintenance service takes care of every item on this list so you can focus on your business. Get in touch to discuss a plan that fits your site’s needs.
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