Why is website maintenance important?
In many cases, I see people building their website and not thinking about the future, leaning back and enjoying life. Then one day they desperately look for the developer that there is a problem.
The analogy is similar to our own health. We only go to the doctor when we get sick. This is very sad, because prevention is in any case more effective than the treatment itself. But let's start at the beginning.
Biology of WordPress
WordPress is an open source CMS system, so its source code is written by several people, so that it is always up-to-date with the current technological change (e.g. adapting to programming languages), or it is always polished, a new bug is discovered, a vulnerability is detected etc.
The same goes for themes and plugins used on WordPress sites. There are always new updates. These include improvements that make our site safer.
In addition, these updates include new features that developers incorporate into a new version of the plugin or theme.
WordPress grows older and, unlike us, gets better and better (this is not necessarily true since Gutenberg).
An unhealthy lifestyle
Like everything on the web, our WordPress website is vulnerable to attacks. The best way to protect them in the first round is to keep everything related to the website, our plugins and so-called core files up-to-date. Otherwise, there are no basic precautions.
Of course, updates can be done by the user himself, but just like with a Windows update, there is a possibility that something will go wrong and the system will crash. Because the update may not run for some reason, there may be a compatibility issue between add-ons, a compatibility issue on the server (e.g. PHP version support, etc.), and many other reasons why we may fail. That's why you should always back up your website, so it's good for a professional to do that. He already has a routine in him, and even if he doesn't know everything, he knows the solution immediately, where to look for it.
Cleaning
Everything else, our car, our apartment, our email account, including our website, needs a big cleanup. For example, if you are using a cache plugin, you may want to delete the cache from time to time (the cache plugin helps us load our page faster). The comment section is worth reviewing, because even if we do everything possible, it is possible that the spambots filled our blog with their comments. Unnecessary or unused extensions can be deleted. It is also worth cleaning the tables of the website database. This includes revisions that contain previous versions of entries, etc. These are used to restore a previous backup from a post, for example, if an opportunity arises. But the tables of previously installed extensions, which have since been deleted, also remain here in many cases, which are no longer useful to us, but only “take up space” in the database. The website's trash can can also be emptied. Deleted articles, entries in the recycle bin, etc.
You may also want to delete unused media files to increase the amount of garbage on your storage.
Run firewall, malware, and antivirus plugins. In many cases, they work automatically and do not require any intervention. With maintenance like this, we can still run it just to be safe.
Create a backup
I cannot stress the importance of this. Whatever happens to your site, if you have a backup, you can always restore the last saved version from there. Even in the case of a static website, where there is no change in content, it is worth saving once a month. In the case of sites where content is uploaded on a daily/weekly basis, this should be done weekly. Of course, there are those who do this once every night.
Although this post only partially touched on the topic of WordPress website maintenance, we can see that maintenance doesn't just consist of three clicks and comes with a lot of responsibilities. However, many people do not maintain their site for months or years. Of course, you can say that there is nothing wrong with the site, but this is a bit like Russian roulette. Updates come in every day, they can try to hack your site every day. Every day can be a server failure or anything else. If you don't have a backup, your entire website is gone. You can always take risks, but it's worth valuing our website and caring about it, because we created it to present us in the online world. It is worth taking the time and money to go to the doctor at least once a month. Every day is an apple.
