With our comprehensive WordPress maintenance checklist, you can ensure that your clients’ websites stay healthy and optimized while improving your WordPress agency service and scaling your business!
Site maintenance is vital for any business and should be understood as such. While most businesses are not familiar with everything it entails, it’s our job and duty to make them aware and at ease, knowing we’ll be there if and when server errors, white screens, or any other trouble appear.
At the same time, we understand that growing your business and a loyal client base can be tricky and complicated. We at ManageWP make it easy. With this checklist, for once, and with the wholesome list of features our WordPress maintenance tool provides you.
There are four main steps in starting your WordPress maintenance business, no matter your level of expertise.
- Figure out what services you can offer.
- Arrange the list of services into a menu of standard packages.
- Create a profitable pricing strategy.
- Start selling to existing and new clients.
As a website owner, there will likely be times when you need to shut your website down temporarily. Perhaps you have some updates to perform or plugins to test before pushing your site live. Whatever the reason, it’s essential to know how to turn on WordPress maintenance mode, which we described in detail in the linked article.
To help you select a specific set of services, we created the ultimate WordPress Maintenance checklist. Use it to define your scope of work, area of expertise, and overall business WordPress agency or freelance model.
The Ultimate WordPress Maintenance Checklist
Maintaining a WordPress website effectively involves several vital steps to ensure its security, performance, and functionality. You’d want to consider these services to help your clients run their businesses smoothly and efficiently, knowing their website is always up and running. Now, some of them are essential and ongoing, while some can be offered as a one-time or a secondary type of maintenance service. Either way, we offer you more than a solid foundation to build your offering.
1. Regular Backups
Backups are your safety net if anything goes wrong during maintenance or due to unexpected issues.
· Use a reliable backup plugin like Duplicator or Jetpack Backup OR maintain everything using our ManageWP extended list of features, including backups.
· Schedule automated backups daily or weekly, depending on your site’s update frequency.
· Store backups both on your server and in remote locations like cloud storage or an external server.
Regular backups serve as a safety net to recover lost or damaged data in the event of hardware failures, cyber-attacks, or unforeseen situations.
2. Regular WordPress Core, Themes, and Plugins Updates
These often include security patches, bug fixes, and new features, making your client’s site more secure, operable, and stable.
· Enable automatic updates for WordPress core when possible.
· Adress vulnerabilities and patch security loopholes to protect the site from hacker attempts and/or cyber threats.
· Regularly check for updates to themes and plugins to their latest versions to maintain security and functionality.
· Update themes and plugins individually to ensure compatibility and avoid conflicts or errors.
Regular updates of WordPress core, themes, and plugins help keep the client’s site secure, operable, and stable, providing peace of mind and ensuring a positive user experience.
3. Security Measures
Protecting your website from threats is crucial for its long-term health. Here are some of the main tasks you’ll perform within this service:
· Monitor for security threats, malware, and vulnerabilities and implement security measures such as firewall protection and malware scanning
· Use strong, unique passwords for your WordPress admin, FTP, and database.
· Limit login attempts and implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) for added security.
· Maintain a firewall to monitor and filter incoming and outgoing traffic while blocking malicious attempts to access the website.
4. Performance Optimization
A fast website improves user experience and SEO rankings. This service optimizes website speed and performance by identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks, optimizing server configurations, and implementing caching strategies. So, it can look a lot like this:
· Research and diagnose areas of the website that are contributing to slow loading times or poor performance.
· Store static content using a caching plugin like WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache.
· Fine-tune server settings to reduce load times and improve site responsiveness.
· Optimize images and use lazy loading to reduce page size and load times.
· Remove unnecessary plugins and scripts to minimize server load.
5. Database Maintenance and Optimization
Over time, your WordPress database can become cluttered, affecting site performance. So, database maintenance is the very type of service to declutter and make your clients’ sites fully operable again. The usual tasks include:
· Use a database optimization plugin like WP-Optimize to clean up and optimize your database.
· Checking for and fixing any database issues, such as corrupt tables or database errors.
· Deleting spam comments, unused drafts, and post revisions.
· Limiting the number of post revisions stored in the database.
· Configuring settings to control post-revision frequency and retention period.
6. Monitoring and Analytics
Monitoring helps you stay informed about your client’s website performance and user behavior.
· Set up Google Analytics to track visitor data, behavior, and traffic sources to understand user preferences and optimize content.
· Use tools like Google Search Console to monitor SEO performance and identify opportunities for growth and improvement.
· Set up uptime monitoring to receive alerts if your site goes down.
· Track and analyze conversion metrics to understand and evaluate marketing campaigns’ effectiveness.
7. Regular Security Audits
Periodic security audits can uncover vulnerabilities before they are exploited.
· Conduct security scans using your security plugin.
· Regularly review user roles and permissions to revoke unnecessary access and prevent unauthorized access.
· Review security policies, procedures, and documentation to ensure they’re up to date and effectively implemented.
Regular security audits help organizations proactively identify and address security weaknesses, reducing the risk of data breaches and cyberattacks.
8. Content Management
Regularly updating content keeps your site relevant and engaging. Review and update website content, manage media files, and ensure content accuracy and relevance. Regularly review and update website content, ensuring accuracy, relevancy, and freshness for visitors and search engines.
· Create a content calendar to plan and schedule posts and updates.
· Review and update outdated or irrelevant content.
· Check for broken links and fix them using tools like Broken Link Checker.
9. SEO Health Check
Perform SEO audits to identify issues affecting your website’s search engine ranking, including broken links, missing meta tags, or duplicate content.
· Create a content calendar to plan and schedule posts and updates.
· Review and update outdated or irrelevant content.
· Review meta tags and descriptions, ensuring they are optimized for relevant keywords.
· Check for broken links and fix them using tools like Broken Link Checker.
· Monitor for and address any performance issues that may impact SEO rankings.
10. User Experience Testing
Test website functionality, navigation, and usability across different devices and browsers to ensure a seamless user experience.
These include tasks such as:
· Verify all website features and functions work as intended.
· Identify and resolve any bugs or errors impacting functionality.
· Evaluate ease of navigation throughout the website.
· Assess the overall usability of the website from a user’s perspective.
· Identify areas for improvement to enhance user experience.
Bonus tasks
Additionally, you can go beyond that and offer 2-4hrs /mo for any client-requested edits. This custom service can include tasks like adding banners, products, posts, images, banners, and anything their business site needs. And if it goes beyond those billed hours, it can go on a reduced hourly rate of your liking.
Another bonus that’s just for you is using ManageWP tool. It saves you a lot of time and effort, all of which you can use to run and scale your business and get new clients – all while knowing that the maintenance services you offer are being handled well. And with custom reporting to prove it 😊 Just think of us as your remote team member that operates 24/7.
Finally, know that our tool comes as a highly cost-effective partner, with automated backups, uptime monitor, security features, maintenance mode, broken link monitoring, custom client reports, performance check and more, to save you a lot of time and headaches.
Wrapping up
Now, some may wonder if it’s worth it, given that some parts of WordPress maintenance are available within the WordPress dashboard. To them, you can just ask:
“How much is your peace of mind worth?”
Offering a WordPress maintenance service is like having an insurance policy if anything goes wrong. Avoid getting caught off-guard or vulnerable to a problem that directly affects their business and makes them lose more nerves and money than they should.
So, use this guide and checklist to create your unique set of WordPress maintenance services, price them accordingly, and let us know in the comments if we missed any. OK?!
Image Credits: Freepik
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