Defining Your Maintenance StrategyFRANK CORSO

If you have a WordPress site, you must have a plan for your maintenance.

Things to consider Hosting environment

Updates

Backups

Restorals

Security

Monitoring

Ask yourself these questions while defining your maintenance strategy:

Hosting Environment

Questions to ask Who is going to keep your server updated?

Who is going to make sure PHP and MySQL are updated?

If you are using a hosting provider, who is going to make sure the hosting provider is performing these updates? Millions of WordPress sites are using PHP versions that no longer receiving security updates because many hosting providers do not keep PHP updated.

Will you have a staging site? Staging sites are copies of your site that you can perform updates and changes on to see if your site breaks before you make changes on your live site.

Updates

Questions to ask How often will you check for WordPress, theme, and plugin updates?

How often will you perform the updates?

Who will perform the updates?

Who is going to check if a plugin is no longer supported?

Backups/Restorals

Questions to ask How often is your site going to be backed up?

Who or what will be performing the update?

Where will the backups be stored?

If the site needs to be restored from a backup, who knows how to do that?

Security

Questions to ask What plugins will you use to secure your site?

Who will keep track of the file changes on your site?◦ How often?

Will you use any site scanning tool? Who will run the scan and how often?

If your site is hacked or taken down, what are the steps you will take to fix it?

Monitoring

Questions to ask How are you going to make sure your site is live and running? (Uptime monitoring)

Who is keeping track of comments, tracebacks, and spam?

Example maintenance strategy Ensure you have a host that keeps server, PHP, MySQL updated with you occasionally checking to make sure you are updated

Use a staging site to perform updates on first to make sure your site doesn't break

Log into your site twice a week to perform any updates

Once a month, check all of your plugins to make sure they appear to still be supported

Use a backup plugin that can restore from backups and set it to backup daily to a remote location

Use a security plugin that emails discovered file changes

Use a malware scanning service such as Sucuri to scan your site regularly

Ensure you have the skills to restore a backup in the event your site is hacked or taken down

Use a tool that scans your site every 15 minutes to ensure it is up and notifies you if it is not

Log into your site weekly to address all comments, tracebacks, and spam

Suggested tools/service My WordPress Health Check – plugin that checks various aspects of your site and clearly shows if something needs attention such as PHP versions, unsupported plugins, and more.

IThemes Security – plugin that ensures your site is secure and monitors file changes

Backup Buddy – plugin that backs up site to remote location and can restore site

Pingdom – service that checks your site regularly to ensure the site is up

WP Stage Coach – service that creates a staging site of your site for you

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