A 2025 comprehensive guide to maintaining a WordPress website

With 2025 underway, now is the ideal moment to review your website’s maintenance routine. WordPress is an exceptional platform for building powerful, flexible websites, but its true potential depends on ongoing care and attention. Regular maintenance is essential to keep your site secure, up-to-date, and performing at its best.

From updating plugins and themes to creating reliable backups and optimising performance, these practices not only protect your website from vulnerabilities but also ensure it delivers a seamless user experience. Without ongoing upkeep, issues like slow load times or data loss can hinder your site’s effectiveness and impact your goals.

In this blog, we’ll share our best practices for maintaining a WordPress website effectively, helping you keep your site running smoothly and securely. By following these recommendations, you can make the most of what WordPress has to offer.

1. 1. Regular file and database backups
   2. Optimise the database
   3. Monitoring site performance
   4. Updating WordPress Core, themes and plugins
   5. Enhancing security
   6. Checking for Broken Links

1. Regular file and database backups

Some site owners don’t realise the importance of creating regular backups until something bad happens to their site. To avoid losing your content due to server failures, hacking, or accidental deletion, we strongly recommend you choose a hosting provider that has built-in backup options, and ideally every hour for the first 24 hours at least, which then usually turn into daily backups thereafter.

Losing important data, such as sales records or customer information, can disrupt your business. Regular WordPress backups ensure your data is safe and can be restored quickly in case of an issue, minimising downtime and stress.

Instead of panicking over data loss, you can resolve the issue and restore your data on your site. The easiest way to maintain backups is by using plugins like Updraft. It helps you to schedule automatic backups so that you can always have a recent copy of your site handy.

However, storing backups in a single location is not recommended. It is not only risky but also occupies more hosting disk space. This is why, you should use cloud storage services like Google Drive or Dropbox that can be integrated with the plugin.

2. Optimise the database

To put it in simple words, WordPress serves as the engine room of your site. That’s because, it stores important data like user details, posts, and settings. When you don’t maintain your database for a long time, it accumulates unimportant data like spam comments, draft revisions, and transient files. This can make your database bloat and slow down your site.

If you don’t want your site’s performance to go down, you can give your database a spring clean and optimise your database regularly. This way you can prevent your site from slowing down and also reduce the risk of errors.

To optimise your database, you can use cleaning plugins like WP Optimize that are developed to boost your page speed and performance. Using this plugin helps you to clear cache, compress images, and minify your database.

Another way to optimise your database is by limiting the number of post revisions saved. By doing so, you can prevent your database from getting cluttered. Also, you should not forget to delete spam comments and unused media files. Once you make this a habit, it becomes easier to maintain your database.

3. Monitoring site performance

Consumers do not like a slow website, especially if they are in a hurry. If your site takes too long to load, it can be harmful to user experience. According to research, users are likely to leave your site if it takes more than three seconds to load. No matter how good your site looks, if it has a higher load time, users will abandon it.

This is why it is crucial to boost your site’s speed so that it doesn’t affect its ranking on search engines. Google and other search engines will favour sites that have a faster load time as this affects user experience, so, if your site is sluggish, it will likely rank lower in cases where your competitors have a faster-loading website.

To resolve this issue, you should monitor your site’s performance regularly. This way you can identify problems even before they affect your site. The best way to go about it is to use tools like PageSpeed Insights which provides detailed insights into your site’s speed and performance.

To enhance the performance of your site, it’s important to have a caching plugin installed and configured. For this, you can use tools like WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, or LiteSpeed Cache for those who are on the LiteSpeed server rather than Apache. For further improvement, you can optimise the images on your site using tools like Imagify, which helps convert JPG and PNG to WebP format.

4. Updating WordPress Core, themes and plugins

Like other platforms, WordPress also releases regular updates, which help fix bugs, enhance security, and add new features. Speaking of which, even themes and plugins are updated so that they are compatible with the latest version of the platform.

Neglecting updates might seem harmless, but it can have serious consequences for your site. Keeping WordPress Core, themes, and plugins updated is essential to protecting your site from potential cyberattacks. Outdated versions can lead to vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit, putting your site and data at risk.

However, you can stop these things from happening by updating your site regularly. But before you proceed with the updates, make sure to create a backup. If the site crashes or anything goes wrong during the update, you will want to make sure you have access to your data in order to roll the site back to the previous version.

Once your site has been successfully updated, make sure to create another backup if you don’t have automated backups available to you.

5. Enhancing security

Protecting your site from cyberattacks is more challenging than ever. Even a small vulnerability can compromise your website’s security, potentially allowing hackers to deface your site, inject malicious code, or exploit sensitive information. To avoid such risks, it’s crucial to be proactive in maintaining your site. Strengthening your platform’s security features is one of the best ways to safeguard against breaches and other potential threats.

Enhancing the security of your site is not just about protecting users’ data. By implementing the right security measures, you can reduce the risk of cyberattacks to a great extent. Additionally, it ensures that your site is safe to browse.

You can boost the security of your site by using plugins like Cloudflare or Wordfence. Both tools have free plans to implement a Web Application Firewall (WAF) on your website. If you want a higher-level service, you will have to select the paid plans. These tools are not only good at monitoring your site, but they can also help detect vulnerabilities and block malicious activity.

For additional safety, you should incorporate the two-factor authentication (2FA) method which is part of the Wordfence Premium offering. The advantage of this feature is that it requires users to verify their identity using a text message or app notification. Using strong, unique passwords and updating them regularly is essential for securing your website.

Additionally, while SSL encryption is now a standard feature for the majority of websites, it’s still crucial to ensure it’s properly configured. SSL not only protects data transmission but also signals to search engines and users that your site is trustworthy, contributing to better rankings and credibility.

6. Checking for Broken Links

As a site owner, it’s important to address broken links promptly. These links not only harm your website’s credibility but also frustrate visitors. When users encounter a dead end, they’re more likely to leave your site and may not return. Failing to fix broken links can negatively impact your user experience and, ultimately, your site’s success.

When your website is set up correctly with Google Search Console, it becomes easier to monitor and fix broken links. Google Search Console crawls your website regularly to check its structure and content. During these crawls, it identifies pages that return a 404 error. By flagging these broken links, the tool helps you take quick action to fix them. This can help enhance your site’s usability and SEO.

For a more in-depth view of your website’s structure and potential link issues, tools like Sitebulb provide detailed audits that can uncover broken links, redirect chains, and other structural issues that may affect your site’s performance.

To deal with broken links within your site, you should set up 301 redirects for the pages that you may have deleted or moved. To make your job easy, you can use the Redirection plugin which will make setting up redirects from the WordPress dashboard a breeze.

Conclusion

Maintaining a WordPress website is essential to supporting your business’s growth and online presence. A well-performing site enhances user experience, builds credibility, and helps you stay competitive. By following the guidelines outlined in this blog, you can ensure your site remains secure, functional, and optimised for success.

Prioritising regular backups, enhancing security, and optimising your database are key steps to keeping your site running smoothly. For those who prefer expert support, our WordPress care plans are designed to take the hassle out of WordPress maintenance. We handle everything from updates and backups to performance monitoring, so you can focus on growing your business with peace of mind.

If you’d like to learn more, we’re happy to review your current WordPress setup and discuss how we can help.

Keep your WordPress site well-maintained, and it will keep working hard for your business.