Why is website maintenance important?
In many cases, I see people making their website and not thinking about the future, sitting 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
Since WordPress is an open source CMS system, many people write its source code so that it is always up to date with the current technological change (e.g., adapting to programming languages), and they always polish it, discover a new bug, vulnerability, etc.
The themes and plugins used on WordPress sites are similar. Newer and newer updates are always coming out for these as well. These include improvements that make our site safer.
Additionally, these updates include new features that developers incorporate into the new version of the plugin or theme.
WordPress grows older this way and, unlike us, gets better and better (this hasn’t necessarily been true since Gutenberg).
Unhealthy lifestyle
Like all things 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 plugin and so-called core file up-to-date. Otherwise, the basic precautions are no longer in place.
Of course, updates can be made by the user himself, but just like with a Windows update, there is a possibility that something will go wrong and crash the system. Because the update may not run for some reason, there is a compatibility issue between extensions, there is a compatibility issue on the server (for example, PHP version support, etc.), and there may be several other reasons why our attempt will fail. That’s why you always need to back up your website, so it’s good to have a professional do it. You already have a routine in it and even if you don't know the solution to everything, you know where to look.
Cleaning up
Everything else, our car, our apartment, our email account, including our website, needs a big cleaning. For example, if you use a cache plugin, you may also want to delete the cache sometimes (the cache plugin helps us load our site faster). The comment section is worth reviewing, because even though we do everything we can imagine that spambots filled our blog with their comments. Unnecessary or unused extensions can be deleted. It is also worth cleaning the database tables of the website. This includes revisions, which include previous versions of posts, etc. These are used to occasionally restore a previous backup from, for example, a post. But in many cases, the tables of plugins that were previously installed and deleted since then remain here, which are no longer useful to us, only “occupied” in the database. You can also empty the website garbage bin with peace of mind. Deleted articles, entries in the recycle bin, etc.
Unused media files may also be worth deleting to keep the garbage in our storage space proliferating.
Run firewall, malware, and antivirus extensions. In many cases, they work automatically and no intervention is required. However, during such maintenance, we can run it just to be sure.
Back up
I cannot stress the importance of this. Whatever happens to our site, if we have a backup, you can always restore the last saved version from there. Also in the case of a static website, on which there is no change in content, it is worth making one backup per month. For sites where content is uploaded on a daily/weekly basis, it is recommended to do so weekly. Of course, there are also those with whom this happens once every night.
While this post has 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 perform maintenance on their site for months or years. Of course, they can say that there is nothing wrong with the site, but it is a bit like Russian roulette. Updates arrive every day, they can try to hack your site every day. Every day can be a server error or anything else. If you don't have a backup, your entire website is gone. You can always take risks, but it is worth valuing our website a little and caring about it, as 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. Because every day is an apple....
