Putting a WordPress site online often feels like a finish line; it’s actually the kickoff. Code ages, the database gets heavier, and attackers probe your weaknesses 24/7. Treating your site as a “one-shot” project inevitably leads to declining performance, security… and revenue.
Risks linked to neglect
According to the Sucuri Website Threat Report 2022, around 96% of hacked CMSs were running WordPress. Wordfence, for its part, recorded in 2020 an average of 2,800 malicious login attempts per second on the same platform.
Leaving plugins unpatched is like leaving the door open. Slow queries pile up, the “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance” warning appears right in the middle of a traffic spike; then come lost conversions, degraded SEO and emergency developer bills, often over $150/h (around €140).
Benefits of ongoing maintenance
Regular maintenance reverses the trend: updates that plug vulnerabilities, daily off-site backups for instant rollback, caching that reduces load time, and active monitoring that protects your revenue while strengthening the E-E-A-T perceived by Google.
Result: a faster, safer site that inspires trust and captures organic traffic over the long term.
The three pillars of WordPress maintenance
Preventive maintenance
- Schedule core, theme and plugin updates.
- Automate backups.
- Remove spam comments.
- Run a weekly anti-malware scan so a small issue never becomes a crisis.
Corrective maintenance
Even with prevention, conflicts happen. Corrective actions cover diagnosing a white screen, restoring a clean backup after a hack, or rolling back a faulty update in a preproduction (staging) environment before it reaches the public site.
Evolutive maintenance
Your business evolves; your site does too. Adding WooCommerce, moving to a block-based theme, or migrating to PHP 8.2 or 8.3 is part of evolutive maintenance that keeps the platform aligned with your goals.
Frequency and planning
Every week: backups, core and plugin updates, security scans, uptime checks.
Every month: performance audit, database cleanup, broken-link detection.
Every quarter: restore test in preproduction, PHP version check, KPI review.
Document each session in a shared log to ensure traceability.
Key areas and maintenance actions
Backups: your insurance policy
Schedule daily incremental backups and weekly full backups, stored off-site (Amazon S3, Google Drive…). Check their integrity every quarter; a corrupted backup is not a backup.
Updates: core, themes and plugins
Best practice: back up → update WordPress → verify → update plugins → update themes. Use a preproduction environment for major versions and enable automatic minor security fixes; you’ll reduce the exposure window.
Strengthen security
- Deploy an application firewall.
- Enforce two-factor authentication for administrators.
- Require strong passwords.
- Schedule nightly anti-malware scans.
- Install an SSL certificate and renew it before Let’s Encrypt’s 90-day limit.
Optimize performance and UX
Combine page caching, image lazy-load and database optimization. Remove unused themes, plugins and media, add mobile SEO optimization, and aim for a LCP ≤ 2.5 s (75th percentile) to stay within Google’s “good” threshold.
Monitor availability and activity
Tools like UptimeRobot ping the site every five minutes and send a Slack alert as soon as it goes down. Pair them with WP Activity Log to know who changes what in the dashboard.
Track SEO and content health
Spot 404 errors, regenerate the XML sitemap and audit Core Web Vitals every month. Check indexation, the implementation of the canonical tag, consolidate your topical authority, optimize internal linking and your backlinks to maintain strong rankings.
How to execute maintenance
Manual workflow
Cost-effective but time-consuming: FTP access, a preproduction environment, and the possibility of an intervention at 2 a.m. in case of a critical error. Advantage: total control. Drawback: higher opportunity cost and increased risk of human error.
Specialized plugins
Combine UpdraftPlus for backups, Wordfence for security, and WP Rocket for caching. The modular approach offers fine-tuned settings but can cause conflicts when versions diverge.
All-in-one dashboards
Services like WP Umbrella, ManageWP or MainWP centralize updates, backups, uptime and reporting from €1.99 per site per month. Ideal for freelancers or agencies managing multiple installations.
Professional agencies and care plans
When downtime costs salaries, outsource. Serious offers range between €60 and €140 per month (about $65–$150) and include SLAs, emergency support and proactive optimization; far cheaper than a disaster recovery.
Choosing and comparing maintenance plans
Checklist to assess your needs
Make the following list: site complexity, monthly traffic, revenue dependence, e-commerce integrations, multilingual requirements, potential local SEO, and internal skill level. The higher the stakes, the more outsourcing makes sense.
Must-haves to include
- Daily external backups.
- Updates every 15 days.
- 24/7 monitoring.
- Malware removal.
- Performance optimization.
- A clear emergency restore procedure.
Pricing models and ROI calculation
Compare a fixed package to one-off repairs. Example: a store generating €2,000/day theoretically loses around €83/h of downtime over 24 hours, but up to around €250/h during peak hours. If a €99/month plan prevents even a single four-hour outage per year, it more than pays for itself.
Maintenance checklists by use case
Standard brochure site
Weekly backups and updates, monthly speed test, quarterly content refresh: sufficient for most corporate sites.
WooCommerce store
Add daily backups of order tables, test purchases on payment gateways, stock sync checks, and abandoned-cart recovery audits.
E-learning / membership platforms
Control course access rules, video streaming performance, quiz grading logic, and certificate generation after each update cycle.
High-traffic publishers
Add a CDN, optimize database indexes every week, and control editorial workflow roles to avoid content overwrites.
Toolbox: recommended plugins, services and resources
Backup solutions
UpdraftPlus for flexible storage, Duplicator for migrations, VaultPress for real-time synchronization linked to Jetpack.
Security suites
Wordfence provides a server-side firewall; Sucuri adds a cloud WAF with a malware-cleanup guarantee; Solid Security combines anti-brute-force defense and 2FA.
Performance optimizers
WP Rocket offers full-page caching and database cleanup, Imagify compresses images in bulk, Autoptimize aggregates and minifies CSS/JS on the fly.
Monitoring and reporting tools
UptimeRobot for free checks every five minutes, Pingdom for transactional monitoring, WP Activity Log for detailed audit logs.
Learning communities and support
Join the WordPress.org forums, specialized Facebook groups, and the “Make WordPress” Slack workspace for real-time peer-to-peer support.