WordPress Maintenance Checklist: 15 Essential Tasks to Keep Your Site Healthy

A WordPress site that runs well today will not run well in six months without regular attention. Updates pile up, database tables bloat, security vulnerabilities appear, and page speed degrades so gradually you do not notice until visitors start leaving. The good news is that preventing all of this takes less time than most people think.

This WordPress maintenance checklist covers 15 essential tasks organized by how often they need to happen — weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually. These are the same tasks I follow after 15 years of building and maintaining WordPress sites. Whether you manage your own site or oversee it for a client, this checklist keeps everything secure, fast, and healthy. For a deeper look at protecting your site specifically, start with our guide on how to secure your WordPress site.

Weekly WordPress Maintenance Checklist

These four tasks form the foundation of WordPress maintenance. They take 15-20 minutes per week and prevent the majority of problems site owners run into.

1. Verify Your Backups Are Running

Backups are your safety net for everything else on this list. Before updating anything, confirm that your most recent backup completed successfully and that you know how to restore from it.

The best backup setup is one you never have to think about. If your site runs on WPlook hosting, daily automatic backups are included — your files and database are captured every night and stored off-server. That means even if an update breaks something at 3 AM, you can roll back to the previous day’s snapshot in a few clicks. If your hosting does not include automatic backups, set up a reliable backup solution and verify it weekly. A backup you have never tested is a backup that might not work when you need it.

2. Update WordPress Core

WordPress releases minor security patches frequently, and major versions two to three times per year. Minor updates (6.5.1 to 6.5.2) are security-focused and should be applied promptly. Major updates (6.5 to 6.6) deserve a bit more caution.

The process is straightforward. Log into your dashboard, navigate to Dashboard > Updates, and click the update button. If your site is business-critical, test the update on a staging environment first. Most quality hosting providers include one-click staging for exactly this purpose. Never skip core updates for more than a week — each unpatched version is a known vulnerability that attackers actively target.

3. Update Plugins and Themes

Outdated plugins are the number one entry point for WordPress attacks. The routine is simple: check for updates, read the changelog to understand what changed, and update one at a time. Updating in bulk saves a few minutes but makes it harder to identify which update caused a problem if something breaks.

While you are in the plugins list, look for anything you no longer use. Every inactive plugin is dead code sitting on your server — it still has files that can contain vulnerabilities, and it adds clutter to your admin. Deactivate and delete what you do not need. The same applies to themes. Keep your active theme, a default WordPress theme as a fallback, and remove everything else.

4. Review and Moderate Comments

Spam comments are more than an annoyance. They can contain malicious links that hurt your SEO and erode visitor trust. Check your comment moderation queue at least weekly. Approve legitimate comments, trash the spam, and respond to genuine questions from readers — engagement signals matter for search rankings.

If comment spam is a recurring problem, our guide on the best anti-spam plugins in 2026 covers solutions that filter it automatically. WordPress also has built-in comment moderation settings under Settings > Discussion that let you hold comments with links for manual review, which catches most automated spam.

Monthly Maintenance Tasks

These five tasks go deeper than the weekly checks. Set a recurring calendar reminder for the first of each month — it takes about 30-45 minutes and catches problems before they compound.

5. Run a Security Scan

A monthly security scan checks your site for malware, suspicious file changes, and known vulnerabilities. Think of it like a health checkup — you want to catch issues before they become emergencies.

What to look for in a scan: unexpected file modifications (especially in wp-includes and wp-admin), unknown admin user accounts, and any files with recent modification dates that you did not change yourself. Hosting-level security features like firewalls and malware scanning add another layer of protection that works silently in the background. For a comprehensive overview of scanning options and what they detect, see our roundup of website scanning tools.

6. Test Your Website Speed

Site speed degrades gradually. A new image here, an extra script there, and suddenly your three-second load time is five seconds. Monthly speed testing catches this drift before it impacts your traffic and conversions.

Run your homepage and two or three key pages through Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix. Focus on Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint (under 2.5 seconds), First Input Delay (under 100ms), and Cumulative Layout Shift (under 0.1). Record the numbers so you can spot trends over time. If performance has dropped, common culprits include unoptimized images, too many active plugins, and render-blocking scripts. Our guide covers practical ways to speed up your WordPress website without starting from scratch.

7. Optimize Your Database

WordPress stores everything in a MySQL database — posts, comments, options, transients, and revision history. Over time, this database accumulates overhead. Post revisions alone can double the size of your wp_posts table if left unchecked.

Optimization is straightforward through your hosting control panel. In phpMyAdmin, select all tables in your WordPress database and choose “Optimize table” from the dropdown. This reclaims unused space and defragments the data. You can also limit stored post revisions by adding define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 10); to your wp-config.php file, which keeps the last 10 revisions per post and prevents unbounded growth. For transients — temporary cached data that sometimes fails to clean itself up — expired entries can be cleared from the wp_options table.

8. Check for Broken Links

Broken links hurt both user experience and SEO. External sites change URLs, pages get deleted, and your internal structure evolves. A monthly check keeps everything connected.

Google Search Console reports crawl errors and 404 pages under the Pages section. This shows you exactly which URLs Google has tried to access and failed. For a broader scan, free online tools like Dead Link Checker can crawl your entire site and report every broken link in minutes. Fix broken internal links by updating the URL or removing the link. For broken external links, either find the new URL or replace the reference with an alternative source.

9. Review Your Analytics

Numbers tell you what is working and what is not. A monthly analytics review does not need to be a deep dive — focus on the trends that matter most.

In Google Analytics, check overall traffic trends (is it growing, flat, or declining?), your top-performing pages (are they the ones you want people to see?), and your bounce rate on key landing pages (high bounce rates suggest a mismatch between what visitors expect and what they find). In Google Search Console, review your average position and click-through rate for important keywords. Pages that rank on page one with low CTR need better titles and meta descriptions. Pages on page two with high impressions are striking-distance opportunities that a few internal links or content updates could push to page one.

Quarterly WordPress Maintenance Tasks

Every three months, step back and look at the bigger picture. These tasks are less urgent individually but compound over time if ignored.

10. Audit Your Plugins

Plugin audits go beyond just updating. This is where you evaluate whether each plugin still earns its place on your site.

For each active plugin, ask three questions. Is it still actively maintained by its developer? (Check the “Last Updated” date in the WordPress repository — anything over a year is a concern.) Does it still serve a purpose you cannot handle another way? And is there a lighter alternative that does the same job with less overhead? Every plugin adds code that runs on every page load, increases your attack surface, and creates another dependency that needs updates. The leanest sites I maintain run 8-12 plugins total. If yours has 25 or more, this audit will likely find several you can remove.

11. Review User Accounts and Permissions

WordPress user accounts are often set up and forgotten. Former employees, past contractors, and test accounts accumulate over time, and each one is a potential entry point.

Go to Users in your WordPress dashboard and review every account. Delete any that belong to people who no longer need access. For remaining accounts, verify that each person has the minimum role they need — contributors do not need editor access, editors do not need administrator access. Enforce strong passwords for all admin-level accounts. If your site handles sensitive data or e-commerce transactions, consider adding two-factor authentication for administrator accounts. This single step blocks the vast majority of brute-force login attacks.

12. Check Your SSL Certificate

An expired SSL certificate makes your site show a “Not Secure” warning in every browser, which immediately destroys visitor trust and tanks your traffic. Most SSL certificates auto-renew, but “most” is not “all.”

Click the padlock icon in your browser’s address bar and check the certificate expiration date. If it expires within the next 90 days, verify that auto-renewal is configured with your hosting provider or certificate authority. Also check that your site forces HTTPS on all pages — mixed content warnings (HTTP resources loaded on an HTTPS page) can appear even with a valid certificate and affect both security and search rankings. For a deeper understanding of why this matters and how to set it up properly, read our guide on secure connection setup.

13. Test Your Forms and Checkout

Forms break silently. An email server configuration changes, a plugin update alters form behavior, or a payment gateway rotates API keys. If your contact form or checkout has been broken for a month, you have lost a month of leads or sales without knowing it.

Submit every form on your site as a real visitor would. Verify that confirmation emails arrive, that form data appears in your dashboard or inbox, and that error validation works correctly. If you run WooCommerce, place a test order through the complete checkout flow — product selection, cart, checkout, and payment confirmation. Check that order confirmation emails send to both you and the customer. This 15-minute test can reveal problems worth thousands in lost revenue.

Annual Maintenance Tasks

Once a year, take an hour to review the foundations. These tasks ensure your site stays aligned with your business goals and does not fall behind the evolving web.

14. Renew Your Domain and Hosting

A domain that expires takes your entire site offline and can be scooped up by domain squatters within hours. Hosting that lapses deletes your files from the server. Neither is easy to recover from.

Check the expiration dates for both your domain name and your hosting plan. Set them to auto-renew if you have not already, and make sure the payment method on file is current. This is also a good time to evaluate whether your hosting still meets your needs. If your traffic has grown significantly, you may need a higher-tier plan for better performance and resources. WPlook hosting plans include daily backups, staging environments, and SSL certificates, which eliminates several items from this checklist automatically.

15. Audit Your Content and SEO

Content decays. Statistics become outdated, external links break, screenshots no longer match current interfaces, and competitors publish newer resources. An annual content audit keeps your site authoritative and relevant.

Pull up your Google Search Console performance report and sort pages by impressions. Your top 20 pages drive the majority of your traffic — review each one for accuracy, freshness, and completeness. Update statistics and dates (yes, changing “2025” to “2026” matters for click-through rates). Refresh screenshots and examples. Check whether your target keywords still match search intent by reviewing the actual search results for those terms. Pages that have dropped in rankings often just need a content refresh rather than a complete rewrite. This single annual effort can recover traffic losses that accumulated gradually over months.

Or Let Us Handle It

Fifteen tasks across four timeframes — it adds up. If you would rather focus on running your business and leave the technical upkeep to someone who does it every day, that is exactly what our services are built for.

Our WordPress and theme setup service covers the full technical foundation: WordPress installation, theme configuration, security hardening, performance optimization, and ongoing maintenance so your site stays healthy without you thinking about it. If speed is the priority, our Speed Optimization service targets the specific bottlenecks slowing your site down and gets your load time under two seconds.

Whether you follow this checklist yourself or hand it off, the important thing is that it gets done. A well-maintained WordPress site is faster, more secure, and ranks better in search results. And it gives your visitors the experience they expect — one that reflects the quality of your business. For more on the security and performance side, explore our complete WordPress security guide.