The Ultimate Cheat Sheet on WordPress Website Maintenance

I’ve seen my fair share of websites that have been hacked in my time as a webmaster and it’s not fun cleaning up the mess so that the site can be taken off of Google’s blacklist. With that in mind, I wanted to provide website maintenance cheat sheet for all the WordPress users out there. These are the exact steps I take for all my clients.

1. Conduct a malware scan of your WordPress website. One of the best ways to protect yourself from malware is to scan for it on a regular basis. I use the BackupBuddy plugin for this task.
2. Backup your site. You should do a full WordPress backup that backs up all your files, plugins, and database on a regular basis but especially if you make any changes to your theme or you change anything to do with the plugins. If you only write new blog posts, you can get away with just doing a backup of the database. I use the BackupBuddy plugin for this task.
3. Store a copy of your backup “off-site.” By off-site, I mean move your backup to another location other than your web server. You can put it on your computer or store it in the cloud on something like Dropbox or Amazon s3.
4. Perform your updates. After, I have a backup of the site; I update any of the plugins, themes, and the WordPress platform itself if it’s needed.

I know it looks like I should be doing step four before I do the backup of the site but there has been times when I have updated a plugin or something and that caused the website to break. So, I always do the updates after I do the backup.

Now that you know the exact steps that I do for all of my WordPress website maintenance clients, you have no reason to be one of those website owners who wonder how they are going to recuperate from a server malfunction or the latest hack.

If you would like some help keeping your WordPress website safe, check out our website maintenance packages, give us a call at 919-891-0545 or shoot us an email.