Most website problems are preventable. The sites that stay healthy are the ones with a regular maintenance routine — even a basic one done consistently beats an elaborate one done occasionally.
Weekly (5 minutes)
Check for software updates Log in to WordPress (or your CMS) and apply any available updates to core, plugins and themes. Don't put this off — security patches are often released in response to active exploits.
Glance at uptime reports If you use UptimeRobot or a similar service, check that no downtime events occurred. Investigate anything unexpected even if the site recovered on its own.
Monthly (30 minutes)
1. Verify your backups
Download your most recent backup file and check it is not zero bytes. Ideally restore it to a local or staging environment to confirm it actually works.
2. Check for broken links
Use Dr. Link Check or the free tier of Broken Link Checker to scan your site. Fix or remove any broken internal links. For broken external links, either update the URL or remove the link entirely.
3. Review Google Search Console
Log in and check:
- Coverage — any new crawl errors or excluded pages?
- Core Web Vitals — any pages flagged as Poor?
- Security & Manual Actions — anything flagged?
4. Test your contact form
Send yourself a test message through your contact form. It's surprisingly common for email delivery to break silently — a plugin conflict or hosting change can stop form emails reaching you without any obvious error on the site.
5. Check your SSL certificate expiry
echo | openssl s_client -servername yourdomain.com -connect yourdomain.com:443 2>/dev/null | openssl x509 -noout -dates
Or simply visit your site in Chrome and click the padlock → Connection is secure → Certificate is valid. Make sure auto-renewal is enabled on your host.
6. Review site speed
Run your home page through PageSpeed Insights. If your score has dropped since last month, something has changed — a new plugin, a large image, or third-party scripts slowing things down.
Quarterly (1–2 hours)
- Audit your plugins — deactivate and delete anything you are not using
- Review user accounts — remove any old admin accounts that are no longer needed
- Test on mobile — open the site on your phone and navigate around; check forms work, text is readable, buttons are tappable
- Check your 404 page — visit
yourdomain.com/this-page-does-not-existand make sure you have a sensible custom 404 rather than a server error page - Review your privacy policy — especially if you have added new third-party tools or changed how you collect data
Keep a maintenance log
A simple spreadsheet or text file noting what you checked and when is more useful than it sounds. When something breaks, being able to say "the site was fine on the 1st and started behaving oddly on the 8th" narrows down the cause considerably.