A standard maintenance check list of tasks for your company’s website would require at least ten steps; verify backups, update software, run security scans, perform speed tests, identify broken links, test forms, review content, review analytics data, check on search engine optimization (SEO) status, and test how your website will appear on mobile devices. The 10-15 minute per week routine can take anywhere from two to four hours when completed on a regular basis every month.
What differentiates a reliable web site that will run year after year with reliability versus a web site that fails just as it is needed most often, is how consistently the owner of the web site performs on a regular basis, its maintenance.
Not heroic actions or costly repairs; simply a regular, ongoing, disciplined effort to perform the basic duties of maintaining a business web site.
Below are the 10 essential maintenance functions for each type of business web site, grouped according to frequency, which will allow you to create a schedule based upon your current work flow.
The Importance of Creating a Web Site Maintenance Checklist
If you do not have a clearly outlined checklist, then all maintenance efforts are likely to be reactive (i.e., fixing issues as they arise), rather than proactive (preventing problems before they become issues). Generally speaking, reactive maintenance costs anywhere from 3 to 10 times more than performing proactive maintenance. As a result, if a web site experiences an outage due to a server failure, emergency responses are required, lost revenues occur while the web site is offline and potential damage occurs to a company’s reputation.
A maintenance checklist allows for continuity. A checklist ensures that no task is overlooked; divides up tasks among employees in such a way that the workload can be managed; and provides a record of completed tasks including date completed. Additionally, when an issue arises with the web site, having access to the maintenance history greatly facilitates identifying the source of the problem vs. starting over from scratch.
The Ten Essentials for Digital Marketing Success
1. Backup Verification
Your backups will not help you if they don’t work when needed. Your automatic backup system should be tested to ensure that it works and that backups may indeed be used to recover your site. Every three months, perform a recovery test using a test environment to determine whether backups are valid.
Frequency: Daily verification. Quarterly recovery test.
2. Software Updates
All WordPress core, theme and plugin software releases include updates with security fixes, bug fixes and new features. First apply an update in a test environment; confirm no adverse effects before applying to a live site. Do not apply an update to a live site without having performed a test.
Frequency: Routine monthly. Within 24 to 48 hours for security patches.
3. Security Scan
Use automated malware detection and file integrity monitoring to check for unauthorized file access, suspicious administrative account use, known vulnerability signatures and other malicious activities. Also, regularly monitor the logs of your security plugin for blocked threats and attempted login events.
Frequency: Automated scanning – Daily. Regularly reviewing logs – Weekly.
4. Speed Test
Conduct speed tests of your web-site’s loading speeds on your most visited pages such as homepage, main service pages, product pages and contact page. Track your core web vitals (INP, LCP & CLS) compared to prior results. Many performance degradations result from updated plugins, bloated databases and/or host related issues.
Frequency: Each month. Anytime after making a significant change (new plugin, significant update, etc.).
5. Broken Link Check
Internal and external broken links negatively affect customer experiences and SEO. Internal/external links fail due to renaming pages, deleting pages or due to external website URL changes. Utilize a broken link checking tool to identify and correct broken links (404 error pages) and redirect chains.
Frequency: Every Month.
6. Form Testing
Fill out each one of your forms including contact forms, quote requests, newsletters subscriptions and payment processing forms. Confirm that your submissions are received by email confirmation, submitted data reaches its intended location (the recipient’s email inbox, CRM system or database). Inactive forms prevent lead generation indefinitely until fixed.
Frequency: Critical forms (contact, payment process) weekly. Secondary forms monthly.
7. Content Review
Update any inaccurate content such as past year’s pricing, discontinued services, expired promotions, old employee listings, incorrect business hours and outdated company information. Inaccurate content decreases the trustworthiness and clarity of your business.
Frequency: Comprehensive reviews each quarter. Immediately upon changing business information.
8. Analytics Check
Evaluate the trends in traffic volume, popular pages, bounce rate, conversion rates. Identify any irregularities — rapid decline in traffic volumes (possibly caused by technical problems), abnormal increases in traffic (possibly caused by bots), decreasing conversion rates (possibly caused by user experience issues). Analytics expose many types of problems that are unnoticeable by simply examining the site.
Frequency: Thorough analysis each month. Weekly overview of important metrics.
9. SEO Health Check
Check Search Console for crawl errors, indexability problems and penalties. Verify that meta title and description tags exist on every page of your site. Confirm proper display of structured data (schema.org). Evaluate ranking trends for your principal keywords.
Frequency: Each month.
10. Mobile Testing
View your site on real mobile devices – not simply browser resizing. Test how users navigate through your site via button clicks and form submission on both iOS and Android devices. Many mobile-related usability problems are not exposed in desktop browsers’ developer tools. More than sixty percent of users view your site on mobile devices therefore a malfunctioning mobile experience impacts the majority of users who visit your site.
Frequency: Each month. After making any changes to the layout/design/functionality.
Weekly vs. Monthly vs. Quarterly Schedule
| Task | Weekly | Monthly | Quarterly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Backup verification | X | ||
| Security scan review | X | ||
| Contact form test | X | ||
| Software updates | X | ||
| Speed test | X | ||
| Broken link check | X | ||
| Analytics review | X | ||
| SEO health check | X | ||
| Mobile testing | X | ||
| Content review | X | ||
| Backup test restore | X | ||
| Full performance audit | X | ||
| Plugin necessity audit | X |
Tools to Automate Your Checklist
There are many tools that can help make some parts of your checklist easier to use, thus eliminating a lot of your manual tasks while also keeping in mind that they will never replace human review/oversight.
ManageWP provides a central location for managing multiple WordPress sites — update management, backup scheduling, uptime monitoring, performance tracking all from one place.
Mainwp is a self hosted alternative to manage wp. It has the same functions as ManageWP, however there are no fees associated with each site. However, mainwp requires additional technical knowledge and your own server infrastructure.
Wordfence/Sucuri provide automated security scanning, firewall protection, malware detection, along with activity logging and alerting for suspicious behavior.
Google search console is free and mandatory — crawl error reporting, indexing status, Core Web Vitals monitoring, and search performance data. Any maintenance checklist would be incomplete without google search console.
When to do it yourself vs. Outsource
Doing it yourself is best suited for people who have 4-8 hours/month dedicated to maintenance of their website, the website is relatively simple (not an ecommerce site, few to no plugins), you feel confident in troubleshooting update conflicts and other minor problems, and you like to learn about the technology behind your website.
Outsourcing is best when your time is more valuable than doing the maintenance, your site is either very large, critical to generating income or you don’t know how to safely perform updates and/or security patches, or you’ve had an issue occur because you didn’t follow through with a maintenance function and you’d rather it doesn’t happen again.
Want this checklist managed for you? Our maintenance plans cover every item on this list and more. View Deutrix Care plans →
For the complete maintenance guide, read our Website Maintenance Ultimate Guide.
Frequently Asked Questions
The monthly checklist should take approximately 2-4 hours depending on how much detail you go into. The average professional service provider will accomplish the same amount of work faster due to specialized software and training.
Backup’s. If anything happens to your site that causes a loss of information/data — whether it be a hack, a botched update or a disaster at your hosting company, you’ll lose everything. Unless you have a recent backup of your site you may as well start over.
