The WordPress Maintenance Checklist

Everything that keeps a WordPress site healthy - what to check weekly, monthly, and yearly. A plain-English maintenance checklist for business owners. Tick items off as you go - your progress saves in this browser.

1. Weekly: check uptime monitoring - was the site down at any point?
2. Weekly: review security logs for suspicious login attempts or file changes
3. Weekly: confirm backups ran successfully - don't assume, verify
4. Weekly: check for broken forms or checkout errors via test submissions
5. Monthly: update WordPress core, theme, and all plugins
6. Monthly: review and delete spam comments
7. Monthly: check disk space usage - media libraries grow fast
8. Monthly: review user accounts - remove anyone who shouldn't have access
9. Monthly: check SSL certificate expiry date - most auto-renew but verify
10. Monthly: run a security scan for malware or suspicious files
11. Quarterly: test a backup restore to confirm backups actually work
12. Quarterly: review plugin list - remove unused plugins, check for abandoned ones
13. Quarterly: check Core Web Vitals and page speed scores
14. Yearly: review domain registration - confirm auto-renew is on
15. Yearly: audit all user accounts and permissions
16. Yearly: review and update business information across the site
17. Yearly: evaluate whether the site still meets business goals - adjust as needed

Next checklist →