Get ready for the best stat you will hear today, WordPress is used by 43.2% of all websites on the internet according to W3Techs. That is an incredible achievement considering there are so many systems available to help you manage your website. We have designed and built many websites using WordPress, from small local companies to huge internationals, e-commerce shopping websites to NHS websites. Being such a popular system has advantages and disadvantages. I’ll cover those in another post, but today we are talking about how to maintain your WordPress website.

A typical WordPress website contains several parts

• WordPress itself that manages the core features of your website
• The database that stores all of your content and settings
• The web server that hosts the WordPress files and database
• Your theme, which controls how your website looks
• Plugins, that provide additional features

WordPress receives updates at varying intervals. Most of these updates are small incremental updates that change the way some features work behind the scenes, but some are much bigger or essential that introduce new features or importantly, contain security improvements.

It is good practice to always be running the latest version of WordPress to ensure you are using the most secure version and have best compatibility.

Updates however can cause problems, which can break your website. Perhaps one of the plugins you are using has not been updated to be compatible with the latest WordPress version.

Before updating WordPress or any plugins you have installed, always make sure you fully back up your files and database. Websites hosted with us are backed up automatically each day, but you also have a single click button to make a full backup on demand. Make sure your hosting has a backup mechanism and ensure you have the backup available should you need to use it.

Once you know that you are backed up, head over to the Plugins section and update each plugin one at a time. After each plugin update, perform a full check of your website. If everything is still working, move on to the next plugin. Be wary that some plugins not only update files, but update the database also. If this is the case, the plugin should ask you to also approve updating the database. Again, after any database changes, ensure you fully test your website before moving on.

Once all of your plugins are up to date, you can then update WordPress itself. If you just updated many plugins, it will be prudent to make another backup save of your website to save having to update all plugins again should the WordPress update fall and you need to restore a backup.

Update WordPress using the inbuilt WordPress updater (message will appear on your dashboard) and again check that all is working as expected.

Hopefully you ran in to no problems, but if you did, make a note of any error messages you see, what caused the error, then restore the site using your latest backup file. Contact your web development team with this info and they will be able to advise next steps.

Once you are running all up to date plugins and WordPress core on your website, you need to ensure that your web server is running a secure and modern version of the scripting language ‘php’. WordPress uses php to manage your website, so running the best version of php is essential.

Your website host should provide you with a control panel to easily choose your version of php. You’d be amazed how many website hosts provide only 10 year+ old versions (anything version 5), ensure as at 2022 that you are running at least php version 7.4 on your website. Version 8 is available but some older plugins have not been maintained to support this still, despite version 8 being released November 2020!

If all of the above sounds a little daunting, we offer not just website hosting but full maintenance packages whereby we take care of absolutely everything. We can even manage the content for you if required.

if something went wrong during a WordPress or plugin update, contact us with as much information as you have and we will dive in and fix it for you. We provide a fixed fee based on how long we expect the fix to take. Sometimes the fix may be a simple 15 minute fix, others it may be just the tip of the iceberg and take much longer. With our maintenance plans, all issues no matter the duration are covered.