WordPress Website Maintenance Checklist: Weekly, Monthly and Yearly Tasks

A WordPress website keeps working only if someone looks after it. WordPress core, your theme and every plugin release updates throughout the year, forms quietly stop sending, links break and backups fail without anyone noticing. This checklist is the routine I use when maintaining business websites built with WordPress and Elementor Pro.

It is written for business owners and in-house teams. Use it to look after your own site, or to check what a maintenance provider should be covering.

Before you start: three things to have in place

• Admin access you control: your own administrator account, plus access to your hosting account and domain registrar.
• A working backup system: automatic backups stored away from the website server, and at least one tested restore.
• A staging site, if your host offers one: a copy of the site for testing larger updates before they go live.

Weekly WordPress maintenance checklist

1. Check that backups ran. Confirm the latest backup completed and includes both files and the database.
2. Review available updates. Note which plugins, themes and WordPress core have updates and read the changelogs for major releases.
3. Apply updates safely. Take a backup first, update one item at a time for important plugins, then check key pages.
4. Test your forms. Submit the contact and quote forms and confirm the emails arrive.
5. Visit the key pages on a phone. Homepage, main service pages and contact page should load quickly and look right.
6. Scan for security warnings. Review alerts from your security plugin or host.

Monthly WordPress maintenance checklist

1. Review user accounts. Remove people who no longer need access and make sure nobody has more permission than they need.
2. Check for broken links on important pages and fix or redirect them.
3. Look at Google Search Console for crawl errors, pages that dropped out of the index and security or manual action messages.
4. Check page speed on your main pages and look for new large images or scripts slowing them down.
5. Remove what you do not use. Deactivate and delete plugins and themes that are no longer needed, after confirming nothing depends on them.
6. Clean up spam comments and form entries, and review the database size.
7. Update content that has changed: opening hours, team members, services, prices or offers.

Quarterly and yearly tasks

• Test a full restore from backup on a staging site, so you know the backups actually work.
• Review hosting: PHP version support, storage, uptime and whether the plan still fits the site.
• Renew your domain and SSL in time, and check that HTTPS works on every page.
• Audit plugins and licenses: make sure premium plugins and themes, such as Elementor Pro, have active licenses so they keep receiving updates.
• Review the content and design: outdated pages, weak calls to action and sections that no longer reflect the business.
• Check accessibility basics: readable text, color contrast, image alt text and forms that work with a keyboard.

WordPress security checklist

Security is part of maintenance, not a separate project. These are the basics every business website should have:

• Strong, unique passwords and two-factor authentication for every administrator.
• WordPress core, themes and plugins kept up to date.
• Only trusted plugins and themes, installed from reputable sources.
• A security plugin or host-level firewall with login protection.
• Limited administrator accounts; editors and authors for day-to-day content work.
• HTTPS on every page.
• Off-site backups you can restore quickly if something goes wrong.

Elementor and Elementor Pro checks

If your site is built with Elementor, add these to your routine:

• After updating Elementor or Elementor Pro, check the header, footer, popups and theme builder templates.
• Regenerate CSS and clear caches if layouts look wrong after an update.
• Keep global colors and fonts in the site settings instead of styling pages one by one.
• Remove unused templates and saved sections that clutter the library.

What to do when an update breaks something

1. Note exactly what broke and which update was applied.
2. Roll back that plugin or theme, or restore the backup taken before the update.
3. Check whether the plugin author has released a fix, then test it on staging before trying again.

Doing it yourself or getting help

Many owners handle weekly checks themselves and bring in help for updates, fixes and anything that touches the design or code. If you would rather have a WordPress developer look after the routine, see my WordPress website maintenance service. If the site needs more than maintenance, read the WordPress website redesign checklist or send me your website for a review.