Website maintenance checklist

Why website maintenance matters

Websites need regular attention. Without it, a site becomes easier to hack, slows down over time and develops problems that put visitors off.

This checklist is organised by how often each task needs doing, so you can build it into your routine.

Daily checks

These take a few minutes but help you catch problems early.

• Check uptime monitoring alerts. Review any alerts from the previous 24 hours and look into any downtime. A service like UptimeRobot or Pingdom can check your site every few minutes and tell you straight away if it goes down.
• Review security notifications. Look for security alerts, failed login attempts or suspicious activity flagged by your security plugin.
• Monitor contact form submissions. Make sure your forms are working and reply to enquiries promptly.

Weekly maintenance

Do these at the same time each week so they become a routine.

• Update WordPress core, plugins and themes. Updates patch security holes, so apply them promptly. Always take a backup before updating in case something breaks.
• Run a security scan. Scan for malware with a plugin like Wordfence or Sucuri, and deal with anything it finds straight away.
• Check your backups worked. Make sure automated backups ran without errors and the files are there. Keep copies in more than one place: your hosting provider, cloud storage and ideally somewhere else as well.
• Test the important parts of your site. Quickly try your forms, checkout, logins and anything else your business relies on.
• Clear out comments and spam. Moderate blog comments and remove spam from your database.

Monthly review

Set aside time at the start of each month for these deeper checks.

• Run a speed test. Test your pages with Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix or Lighthouse, and fix anything new, such as oversized images or a slow server response.
• Review Google Analytics. Look at traffic trends, popular pages, bounce rates and enquiries, and watch for sudden drops.
• Check Google Search Console. Review indexing, crawl errors, mobile usability issues and search performance.
• Tidy the database. Clear out old post revisions, spam comments and leftover data to keep it efficient.
• Review and update content. Check your key pages for anything out of date.
• Test on different devices. View your site on a few phones, tablets and browsers to catch display problems.

Quarterly audits

Bigger reviews, every three months.

• Full content audit. Review every page and blog post. Update outdated content, combine thin pages, fix broken links and check that contact details and prices are current.
• SEO review. Look at your rankings, keyword positions and search traffic. Improve pages that are slipping, update page titles and descriptions, and look for new things people are searching for.
• Check for broken links. Use a tool like Broken Link Checker to find and fix broken internal and external links.
• Review security settings. Audit user accounts, change passwords, review firewall rules and check your security settings.
• Test a backup restore. Restore a backup to a staging site to prove your backups work.
• Review your hosting. Check server response times and resource use, and whether your hosting plan still suits you.

Tip: Until you've restored a backup, you don't know it works. Testing a restore once a quarter is the only way to check.

Yearly renewals and review

These annual tasks prevent your site going offline and help you plan ahead.

• Renew your domain name. Turn on auto-renewal so you can't lose it by accident, and set a calendar reminder at least 30 days before it expires.
• Renew your hosting. Review what you need and renew or upgrade your plan.
• Renew your SSL certificate. Make sure it stays valid. Most modern hosting includes a free certificate from Let's Encrypt that renews automatically.
• Do a full website audit. Review the design, features, content, SEO, security and speed, and plan improvements based on what you find.
• Check your business information. Update contact details, opening times, staff details, prices and legal pages.
• Compare your site with competitors. See how it stacks up against other businesses in your field and plan improvements for the year.
• Review connected services. Check that every integration and third-party service is still needed and working.
• Plan a budget. Set money aside for any design refresh, new features or bigger updates you'll need in the coming year.

Tip: If you'd rather not do all this yourself, my care plans start at £10 a month and cover hosting, SSL, daily backups, monitoring and security.