WordPress Maintenance Checklist: 15 Tasks to Do Every Month

Most WordPress sites do not get hacked or slow down because of a clever attack. They degrade because nobody looked at them for six months. This is the checklist our maintenance team runs on every client site, with how long each task takes so you can decide what to do yourself and what to hand off.

Weekly (about 20 minutes)

1. Update WordPress core, plugins and themes. Read the changelog for anything touching WooCommerce or your page builder, update on staging first if the site earns money, then update live. Time: 10 minutes, longer when something breaks.
2. Check the backup actually ran. A backup plugin that silently failed in March is discovered in September. Open the backup dashboard and confirm the latest file exists and is the expected size. Time: 2 minutes.
3. Run a security scan. Wordfence, Solid Security or your host’s scanner. Look for modified core files and unknown admin users. Time: 5 minutes.
4. Skim uptime and error logs. An uptime monitor such as UptimeRobot is free. Two 10-minute outages in a week usually mean a hosting or cron problem worth catching early. Time: 3 minutes.

Monthly (about 90 minutes)

5. Test a restore. Restore last week’s backup to a staging site. If you have never done this, you do not have backups; you have hopes. Time: 20 minutes.
6. Check Core Web Vitals. Run PageSpeed Insights on the homepage, a product page and a blog post. Watch for new render-blocking scripts from plugins or tracking tags. Time: 10 minutes.
7. Find broken links and 404s. Google Search Console → Pages → Not found, plus a crawler such as Screaming Frog on the free tier. Redirect or fix. Time: 15 minutes.
8. Review Search Console. Coverage errors, manual actions, new queries you are ranking for, and pages that lost clicks. Time: 10 minutes.
9. Clean the database. Post revisions, expired transients, spam comments and orphaned post meta. WP-Optimize or WP-CLI does this safely. Time: 5 minutes.
10. Delete what you do not use. Inactive plugins and themes are still attack surface. Remove them. Time: 5 minutes.
11. Review users. Remove former staff and contractors, enforce strong passwords and two-factor authentication for administrators. Time: 5 minutes.
12. Test every form and the checkout. Submit the contact form, place a test order, confirm the emails arrive. Email delivery breaks quietly when hosts change settings. Time: 10 minutes.
13. Check SSL and domain expiry. Certificates auto-renew until the day they do not. Time: 2 minutes.
14. Review the analytics basics. Traffic by source, top landing pages and conversion events. A sudden drop often points at a technical change. Time: 10 minutes.
15. Write down what changed. A one-paragraph log each month makes future debugging much faster. Time: 3 minutes.

Extra checks for WooCommerce stores

• Run WooCommerce → Status → Tools: clear transients and verify the database tables after every major update.
• Confirm payment gateways are in live mode and webhooks are reaching the site (Stripe and PayPal dashboards show failed deliveries).
• Check that scheduled actions are not piling up under WooCommerce → Status → Scheduled Actions. Thousands of pending actions mean WP-Cron is not firing.
• Review abandoned-cart and renewal emails for subscriptions.
• Update tax rates and shipping zones when you expand to a new region.

What to automate

Backups, uptime monitoring, security scanning and minor plugin updates can all run unattended. Restores, performance checks, form tests and anything touching the checkout should be done by a person. The mistake we see most often is “auto-update everything” on a store: a plugin update changes a checkout field at 3 am and orders stop until someone notices at noon.

Signs your site is overdue for maintenance

• The admin dashboard shows a double-digit number of pending updates.
• Pages take more than three seconds to load on mobile.
• You have no idea where the backups are stored.
• Google Search Console has emailed you about errors and nobody opened it.
• Contact form submissions have gone quiet.

Do it yourself or hire it out?

The full checklist takes two to three hours a month for someone comfortable in WordPress, and considerably longer when something breaks. If your time is worth more than $30 an hour, a maintenance plan is cheaper. Our WordPress maintenance plans start at $99 per month and cover everything above, including a monthly report. The Care Plus plan adds two hours of content and design changes each month. Ask us for a free site health check if you want to know where your site stands first.