It’s Friday, and you have an important meeting to get to. You know you need to arrive at the airport two hours before your flight, so you finish off last-minute tasks on your website.
As you look over the backend of your website, you see that you need to update your plugins. Seems pretty easy, so you click “update” and get ready to jet.
Uh-oh. Something went wrong, and you get an error message. What was once a quick click of the button is now something you’ll be stuck troubleshooting.
Lesson learned: Don’t update WordPress plugins on a Friday or before you have an important meeting.
A surefire way this will never happen to you again is to have a website maintenance schedule for your website.
No time for website maintenance? Leave it to us! Contact our friendly office at (844) 972-6224 or send us a message through our website maintenance inquiry form.
Office: (844) 972-6224 Contact Us
What Is a Website Maintenance Schedule?
When you’re running a business, the last thing you want to think about is website maintenance. That’s exactly why a schedule matters. A website maintenance schedule gives you a plan for regularly checking, updating, and protecting your website before small problems turn into bigger ones.
A strong website maintenance schedule includes:
- Software, plugin, and theme updates
- Security monitoring
- Website backups
- Broken link checks
- Form testing
- Page speed and performance checks
- Hosting and server checks
- Content updates
- User access review
For many business websites, monthly maintenance is the baseline. Websites with e-commerce, membership features, frequent content changes, or important lead-generation forms may need more frequent attention.
Without a regular maintenance schedule, small problems can turn into larger issues. Broken links, 404 errors, plugin conflicts, security vulnerabilities, form problems, and server issues can affect user experience, lead generation, SEO, and site performance.
The point of a website maintenance schedule is simple: know what needs to be checked, how often it should be reviewed, and who is responsible for keeping the website running smoothly.
Learn more about our website maintenance services >
What Does Website Maintenance Do?
A website maintenance schedule includes safeguards against serious problems and helps make your website perform at an optimal level on a consistent basis.
While there are numerous WordPress maintenance tasks that should be performed monthly, the following are the most important ones to consider when figuring out a maintenance schedule that will work best for you and your business.
1. Security
Security is a priority when it comes to website maintenance. WordPress websites are targeted every day, and if you don’t have a maintenance schedule in place, your website could fall victim to hackers.
Outdated plugins, themes, passwords, and software can create vulnerabilities that make your site easier to attack. WordPress security measures help protect your website from being hacked and causing issues like malware, suspicious files, or defacement.
2. Backups
If an update creates a problem, having a backup ensures that your website can be restored back to normal.
Backups also come in handy when you’re regularly adding new content or making changes to your website. The more often you make changes, the more frequently you should do backups. Think weekly or even daily rather than monthly.
3. Website health monitoring
One important website maintenance task for business websites is checking overall site health. Is your website running smoothly, or is it bogged down by too many plugins and slow to run?
By monitoring the health of your website, you ensure that it’s running at peak performance. As website managers, we do this by using an uptime monitoring service. Uptime monitoring services check your website regularly to ensure it’s accessible and running properly. They will also send you alerts if they detect any issues.
4. Update plugins and themes
You might notice every time you log into your website, you see a notification of a plugin or theme needing an update. While it’s easy just to click the “Update” button on all plugins that need updates, if you’re running an older version of the plugin or you have many plugins installed, you may encounter conflicts or compatibility problems.
When you have a website maintenance schedule, these tasks and more are taken care of, so you don’t have to worry about potentially breaking your website.
5. Reduce expenses
Reacting to problems after they happen is usually more expensive than preventing them. A regular website maintenance schedule helps catch issues earlier, reduce emergency repairs, and keep small problems from turning into big ones.
When you implement a website maintenance schedule, you typically end up saving money because your website will continue to run better over time, with fewer costly problems to fix.
Office: (844) 972-6224 Contact UsThe Best Website Maintenance Schedule
The best website maintenance schedule for your business is one that keeps your site secure, up to date, and running smoothly (not to mention saving you headaches, time and money). And a maintenance schedule is always easier to follow when someone is responsible for it.
If you don’t have the internal resources to stick to a schedule, our team can help. Emily Journey & Associates offers professional website maintenance services for businesses and nonprofits that want updates, security checks, backups, hosting support, and ongoing technical support handled by a dedicated website manager.
View our monthly website maintenance plans or contact our friendly office to talk about the website maintenance schedule that makes sense for your site.
