A website isn't a one-time project — it's closer to a car than a sculpture. Skip maintenance for long enough and small issues (an outdated plugin, a slowly climbing image folder, a forgotten expired SSL cert) compound into the kind of problem that costs far more to fix than it would have to prevent. Here's what we check on client sites every month.
1. Backups — Actually Verify Them
Confirm the latest automated backup ran successfully and, at least quarterly, actually test restoring it somewhere. A backup that's never been restored is a backup you don't actually know works — this is the single most common gap we find on sites we inherit from another agency.
2. Core, Theme and Plugin Updates
Update WordPress core, the active theme, and every plugin — but on a staging copy first if the site is business-critical, since updates occasionally introduce conflicts. Most real-world site hacks exploit a known, already-patched vulnerability in software nobody updated, covered in more detail in our website security basics guide.
3. Broken Link and 404 Audit
Old blog posts get deleted, products get discontinued, external sites you linked to go offline. A monthly crawl catching broken internal and outbound links protects both user experience and the internal linking structure that supports your on-page SEO.
4. Speed and Core Web Vitals Check
New plugins, new images, and new third-party scripts (chat widgets, tracking pixels) quietly erode page speed over time — a site that passed Core Web Vitals at launch can silently drift back into failing territory six months later without anyone noticing until traffic drops.
Nobody notices a website degrading gradually — they just notice, one day, that it feels slower and ranks worse than it used to.
5. Form and Checkout Testing
Contact forms silently breaking is one of the most common — and most expensive — issues we find, because a business can go weeks without realizing leads have simply stopped arriving. For ecommerce sites, this extends to actually testing checkout end-to-end, payment gateway included.
6. Domain and SSL Expiry
Confirm domain renewal is set to auto-pay and SSL certificates auto-renew (most modern hosts handle this automatically, but it's worth a monthly glance rather than assuming). We touched on why domain expiry specifically is worth guarding against in our guide to choosing a domain name.
7. Analytics and Search Console Review
A quick monthly look at Google Search Console flags crawl errors, indexing issues, and manual actions before they become serious problems, while an analytics review catches sudden traffic drops early enough to actually investigate the cause.
Conclusion
None of these seven checks take more than a few minutes individually, but skipped consistently over months they're exactly how small, cheap problems become expensive emergencies. If ongoing maintenance isn't currently part of your website plan, let's set it up properly.