Why Your WordPress Site Needs Maintenance
WordPress Website Updates
If you have a website built on WordPress, it needs maintenance. The WordPress code is constantly being updated for security and functionality reasons. You can be sure every time one of the browsers releases an update, a new mobile phone or device is released, or Windows or Mac updates their OS – WordPress will also have to make updates to allow for new changes. This is also true for the theme of your site and any plugins running on it.
Besides just accommodating device, browser and operating system changes, unfortunately there are a lot of shady people who are constantly looking for vulnerabilities in websites in order to take advantage of them. Anytime a weakness is reported in code, security patches are made to try to stay ahead of these hackers.
The #1 reason websites get hacked is for outdated code. (read more about thison Sucuri’s blog)
WordPress Website Backups
In tandem with updating the code on your site, it is critical to always have a clean backup of your site. This is critical in case:
a) one of the WordPress, theme or plugin updates breaks something on your site or
b) your site gets hacked.
You need to be able to quickly restore your site to working condition while the other issues are resolved.
With WordPress sites there are two versions of backups:
1. the database that contains all the content (posts, pages, contact form entries, user profiles, etc.) and
2. the files (images, the styles of the site and any attachments).
I store backups on the cloud so that if your server was to be totally compromised you will still have a safe copy of your site.