WordPress is a great platform that enables you to create a custom website design experience beyond what is currently available on platforms like SquareSpace. But, there are other limitations – all of that freedom to DIY it, means that you have to DIY your website maintenance too (or hire a team to do it). So let’s make sure you know how to maintain your WordPress website.

If your website is on WordPress there are 3 things you should be doing at least 1x per month:

  • Making sure all of your plugins are up to date. Not only will this keep your site running smoothly; it helps to keep your website secure too!
  • Checking to make sure your theme is up to date and that you are using the most current version of WordPress.
  • Creating a website backup. This is especially important if you have made any major changes to the website recently. It’s also helpful if you post content (blog posts, etc) regularly or if you run a membership site that you self-host.

It’s kind of boring stuff, but you’ll be happier for doing it! Otherwise, your formatting can start to get wonky, your site can start to run poorly, annnnd if something goes wrong and you don’t have a backup, you’ll be sorry. 

True story, before I got wise to this, all 3 of my WordPress websites got hacked on the same day once. If I had backups, I could have restored them myself. Since I didn’t, I had to pay $1200 for someone to run through all of the code manually and remove the malicious code. Not fun.

So here’s how you can maintain your WordPress website:

Updating Plugins

When you log into your WordPress dashboard you will see ‘Plugins’ on the left-hand side. If you click on this, you will see a list of all of the plugins on your site. Some will likely say that a new update is available, so you can manually update them all individually, or click on the box to the right and then bulk apply updating.

Making Sure Your Theme is Up-to-Date

For this one, it can be easiest to see if there is a number with an arrow cycling symbol up at the top of your website (check out the video if you’re not sure where this is) – if so, click on this and you will see both plugins that need updating and themes that need updating. You don’t need to update any theme that you are not currently using. 

Creating a Back-Up of Your Site

There are a few tools that you can use to create a website backup. The easiest thing to do is to see if your hosting provider provides a backup service. This way, if you ever do need a backup to be restored, you can simply call them up and ask them to restore one of the backups that they’ve done for you.

If your website host does not provide this service or if you don’t want to spend money on it in the case that it is an added expense, then I show you two ways that you can create website backups on your own in the video.

For a step-by-step illustration check out the video below:

Not for you? I handle all WordPress updates and backup for $35/month. Contact me here if you would be interested in this subscription. It also entitles you to website changes at my continuing client rate!

Need help with upleveling your WordPress site design? Check out my (100% free) Skillshare course ‘Customize Without Code’ here.