WordPress Maintenance Checklist: What to Do Every Week, Month and Quarter

A WordPress website is never really finished. Plugins release updates, security threats change and content grows. Without regular care, small issues become outages, hacks or lost leads. Use this WordPress maintenance checklist to keep your business website healthy.

Weekly tasks

• Confirm automatic backups ran and that a recent copy is stored off-site.
• Review available updates for WordPress core, themes and plugins.
• Check uptime and security alerts.
• Test your main contact or quote form and confirm emails arrive.
• Clear spam comments and form entries.

Monthly tasks

• Apply updates on a staging site first, test, then update the live site.
• Run a malware and vulnerability scan.
• Check site speed and Core Web Vitals for key pages.
• Look for broken links and 404 errors and add redirects where needed.
• Review Google Search Console for indexing and security issues.
• Remove inactive plugins and unused themes.

Quarterly tasks

• Restore a backup to a test environment to prove it actually works.
• Review admin users, roles and passwords; remove old accounts.
• Check your PHP version and hosting resources.
• Clean the database: revisions, transients and orphaned tables.
• Review content: update outdated pages, prices and screenshots.
• Check legal pages such as privacy and cookie policies.

Yearly tasks

• Renew domains, SSL certificates and premium licences.
• Audit accessibility and fix major issues.
• Review your hosting plan, CDN and caching setup.
• Plan design or content improvements based on analytics.

Should you do it yourself?

Small sites can follow this checklist in-house. For business-critical sites, online stores and membership platforms, a professional maintenance plan saves time and reduces risk because updates are tested, issues are fixed quickly and someone is accountable when things go wrong.