Zen & The Art of WordPress Maintenance

Maintaining your WordPress website is crucial to its loading speed, its security and even its very survival. While it’s easy to just set and forget your site, neglecting regular maintenance can lead to serious issues down the road.

Regular Updates Are The First Line of Defense

WordPress, along with its plugins and themes, frequently releases updates to patch security vulnerabilities, fix bugs, and improve performance. Failing to update these regularly can leave your site exposed to hackers and malware.

However, it’s essential not to update everything all at once. Plugins and themes might not be fully compatible with the latest WordPress version, leading to conflicts that can break your site. Our advice is to always update one item at a time, starting with the core WordPress update, and check that everything is running smoothly after each update.

Security: Keeping Your Site Safe

MOG WordPress websites use WordFence security plugin to scan the database for threats, prevent the barrage of nefarious login attempts and prevent any malware from getting a hold. But even these security methods are often not enough; these plugins are designed to aid you in keeping your WordPress site safe but you will always need to check the notifications and look for threats yourself too.

Caching: Speed Matters, But Not If Your Site Looks Broken

Well optimised caching is an absolute miracle agent for WordPress sites. It often makes the difference of up to several seconds in precious loading time and gives our websites the kind of snappy interactivity we expect in modern times.

But cached files notoriously run into problems if they aren’t regularly checked and flushed. A website with cache left unchecked for months may end up corrupting and displaying all kinds of erroneous styles; from images missing, to huge awkward layout shifts, it’s not worth risking the 5 minutes it takes to check and reload your cache.

Backups: Your Safety Net

WordPress Backups are your last line of defense in case something goes wrong, which means if you aren’t regularly backing up your site you could be in big trouble if something goes wrong.

WordPress backups can be a bit tricky to understand and implement, but it’s worth the effort if you are maintaining a site yourself.

Some hosting companies provide server backups, but they will often charge to restore these backups nowadays, and they rarely keep them longer than a month. So if you find out your issues started 3 months ago because you weren’t checking, there’s likely nothing more you can do to save it.

The moral here is ‘Check & maintain your WordPress site every week’! Whilst it definitely is a learning curve and takes some time to get confident with it, regular maintenance of your site can extend a WordPress site’s lifespan up to a decade or even more! And failure to maintain it will likely cut that lifespan by three quarters.

MOG Media includes maintenance in many of our website packages, handling everything from backups, security, updates and cache to ensure either your site is always working, or we catch a problem as it happens for the best chance at solving it nice and simply.

Thanks for reading, we hope this MOG Blog has been helpful to you in some way!