WordPress maintenance and care plans

Maintenance is a short list of jobs done on a schedule: updates, backups, a look at the site afterward, and a check that nothing has got in. None of it is hard. What goes wrong is that it is skipped, or done without a way back.

Doing it yourself. The maintenance checklist says what to do each week, month, quarter and year. Before the first update, have backups that run by themselves and are kept somewhere other than the server. How often to update settles the timing: security fixes as soon as you reasonably can, everything else on a regular round. Then update in the safe order, on a staging copy first if the site takes orders or bookings. If an update goes wrong anyway, the failed update runbook is the way back.

Deciding whether to hand it over. What WordPress maintenance includes says what the word covers and how to check that each part was done. Whether it is worth paying for says who needs a plan and who does not, and whether your host already does it says how to find out. What it costs explains why prices differ so much, and what a WordPress site costs to run each year lists every line of the budget, upkeep among them. If the person who built the site has gone, start by taking the site over.

Handing it over. How to choose a maintenance service gives the questions to put to anyone, us included, and how to check each answer. The cost calculator works out what the upkeep costs you now, from your own figures.

Our own maintenance service is a monthly care plan for one site, with what each plan includes and what it costs written out on the page.