WordPress website maintenance: what to check every week and every month
WordPress website maintenance means regular updates with a backup, checking errors and Site Health, testing forms and backups, and keeping content and 404 errors in order. A few minutes every morning and half an hour once a week is enough for the owner to know what's going on. The server, backups and code fixes stay with your host and technical caretaker.
Author: The TellMyShop team. A guide for WordPress site and WooCommerce store owners: the cause, the manual fix and the same work in a chat conversation.
Last updated: · 5 min read
What site maintenance is made of
Maintenance is a handful of repeated tasks at different intervals. The table shows who usually takes care of each one.
| What | How often | Who usually does it |
|---|---|---|
| A glance at errors, new 404 addresses, Site Health | daily or every few days | you |
| Plugin, theme and WordPress updates | weekly, security fixes sooner | you or whoever looks after the site |
| Checking that the contact form and orders work | weekly and after every update | you |
| A full site backup and a restore test | backup daily, test every few months | your host or whoever looks after the site |
| PHP version, certificate, server resources | when a notice comes in, or once a quarter | your host |
| Redirects for addresses with a 404 error | weekly | you |
| Refreshing old posts and pages | monthly | you |
| Reviewing user accounts and plugins nobody uses | quarterly | you |
The WordPress documentation on automatic updates explains how they work and when WordPress emails you about them. You'll find the recommended PHP and database versions on the WordPress requirements page.
What to check on a WordPress site once a week
Once a week, go through this list. It takes half an hour and catches most problems before customers notice them.
- Make or check a backup. Before you update anything, make sure there's a fresh backup in your hosting panel.
- Update plugins one at a time. After each one, open the home page and one inner page. If something breaks, you know which plugin it was. If it does break, our post on what to do when WordPress breaks after an update will help.
- Send a test form. Check that the message arrived. In a store, place a test order or ask whoever looks after the site to do it.
- Open Tools → Site Health. Check for new critical issues. We explain each message in our post on WordPress Site Health.
- Review 404 errors. Redirect addresses that get visits to their equivalents. Our guide to WordPress 404 errors explains how.
- Look at Search Console. The pages report shows whether Google has stopped indexing important addresses. Search Console help on permissions explains how to check and whom to add to the property.
Keep a note in one place of what you updated and when. When something stops working a week later, that note will point to the cause faster than searching the whole admin. If several people look after the site, agree who does the updates, so nobody clicks them at the same time.
Once a month, add one old post to refresh. We explain how in our post on updating old posts.
A five-minute morning review
Wednesday, 8:15. The coffee's still hot, and instead of clicking around the admin you write one sentence to your chat (Claude or ChatGPT). This is the ready “Morning review” task in the TellMyShop plugin for WordPress and WooCommerce, available already in the free TellMyShop Free version, which only reads the site. The chat gathers new errors from the logs, new addresses with a 404 error, the Site Health status and plugins with available updates, then tells you what matters today.
You: Do the morning review.
Your chat: Since yesterday: 2 new addresses with a 404 error, and one of them, /pricing-2025/, has 12 visits. The new content is at /pricing/.
Your chat: Logs: no new critical errors. Site Health unchanged.
Your chat: Updates: 3 plugins, including a security fix for the Example Form plugin. That one is worth doing today, after a backup.
Your chat: I suggest a redirect:
You: Yes, redirect it. I'll do the update this afternoon.
Your chat: Redirect saved. You can undo it from the change history.
Card status: waiting for your “yes”old version: /pricing-2025/ → 404 error
new version: /pricing-2025/ → /pricing/ (301)
The addresses, numbers and names in this conversation are examples. The review itself works in Free. The chat saves redirects in TellMyShop Pro straight after the licence is activated. It can update a plugin with the Plugins switch on, which lasts 24 hours and requires a database backup from today. Every save has a preview and waits for your approval, and you can undo most changes from the change history.
In WordPress the plugin can also email you a weekly report: changes, 404 errors, SEO gaps and, in a store, low stock, with no customer personal data. You turn it on in the plugin settings.
What stays with your host and technical caretaker
Some maintenance needs access to the server or the code and can't be done from the WordPress admin or from a conversation with the chat. TellMyShop doesn't replace your host or technical caretaker. These stay with them:
- full site backups stored off-site and restore tests (the plugin backs up the database before changes and the files it changes itself, but that isn't a backup of the whole site),
- PHP version, certificate, server resources and security, including the firewall and cleaning up after a hack,
- code fixes in the theme and custom plugins,
- user accounts, passwords and roles, which TellMyShop never sees or changes,
- responding to an outage, when the site is down and the admin doesn't respond.
A good technical caretaker will also deal with site speed when it starts to slow down: caching, the PHP version and heavy plugins. The general principles are in the performance chapter of the WordPress administration handbook, and we cover it from the owner's side in our post on a slow WordPress site.
When choosing a company or person for maintenance, ask about the scope, response time in an outage, how often and where backups are kept, how they report, and in whose name the hosting, domain and licences are registered. If you're just taking over a site from a previous company, start with the list in our post on taking over a WordPress site from an agency.
The TellMyShop for WordPress page describes what Free and Pro include, and licence prices are in the pricing. You can download the free version from the TellMyShop Free page.
Questions and answers
What does WordPress website maintenance involve?
Regularly making sure the site works, is secure and is up to date. That means updates with a backup, checking errors and Site Health, testing forms and backups, and keeping content and 404 errors in order. You can do some of it yourself, some needs your host or a technical caretaker.
How often should I update WordPress and plugins?
Security fixes are best installed within a few days of release. You can collect the other updates and do them once a week, after a backup and with a check of the site after each one. Major versions of WordPress and WooCommerce are worth testing on a staging copy first.
Should I turn on automatic plugin updates?
For simple, popular plugins on a company site, often yes. For store, payment and page builder plugins it's better to update by hand, so you can check straight away that everything works. WordPress sends an email after an automatic update, including a failed one.
How much does WordPress website maintenance cost?
It depends on the scope: whether it covers only updates or also backups, monitoring, fixes and content changes, and on the response time when something breaks. When comparing offers, ask about the scope, response time and who has access to your accounts, not just the monthly price.
Will the TellMyShop plugin replace the company that looks after my site?
No. TellMyShop doesn't make off-site backups of the whole site, doesn't change the server, accounts or passwords, and doesn't react on its own at night. It helps the owner know what's happening on the site every day and do some of the work with the chat, with a preview and approval.
WordPress is a trademark of the WordPress Foundation. WooCommerce is a trademark of Automattic Inc. Claude is a trademark of Anthropic PBC. ChatGPT and OpenAI are trademarks of OpenAI. TellMyShop is not affiliated with these companies.