WordPress maintenance

Maintenance of your WordPress website is extremely important. It helps you avoid problems such as security isuses, performance issues and simply missing functionality. Your website must remain reliable, fast and secure and therefore updating WordPress on a weekly basis is highly recommended!

Update WordPress

Now that you know that it is important to update your WordPress website preferably on a weekly basis, the question is how best to perform an update to WordPress. We will explain this below through a step-by-step plan that will allow you to update easily and most importantly safely!

1. Update WordPress
2. Update WordPress themes
3. Update WordPress plugins
4. WordPress cleanup

WordPress backup

First before we get started, it is hugely important to have an up-to-date WordPress backup. We do this through the free plugin called “Updraft Plus”.

This plugin allows you to create a full and complete backup of your entire website in just a few clicks. If you don’t have the plugin yet, we’re going to install it first through the steps below:

UpdraftPlus install within WordPress

1. Log in to your WordPress website.
2. In the left menu, click on “Plugins.”
3. You enter “Updraft plus” in the search bar at the top right and click enter.
4. Then the plugin will be shown and you install it + activate it.
5. Once you have done this, you will see Updraftplus in the menu on the left.

Once you have installed UpdraftPlus, click on it in the left menu. The UpdraftPlus page will open. Then click on Current Status and you will see a blue button that says “Backup Now”. Here you click on it, after which you go through the backup process and at the end download your own created WordPress to your PC.

Update WordPress

Now that you have a complete backup of your website, you can safely go through the WordPress update process. Should things go wrong, you can use UpdraftPlus to upload and restore the backup and you will be back to the state before you updated your website.

In the roadmap below, we explain how to update WordPress to the latest version.

Step for updating WordPress

1. Log in to your WordPress website.
2. Click on “Dashboard” and go to “Updates” there.
3. You will now see a blue button called “Update Now”. Here you click on it after which WordPress will update itself completely. This will take a few minutes after which WordPress will be fully updated to the latest version!

Now that you have updated WordPress, it is important to also update the themes and plugins to the latest version. In the next section, we’ll explain the best way to do this!

Update WordPress themes

To update your WordPress themes, we have created a roadmap below. This will ensure that the themes you use are also equipped with the latest version and are therefore safe, fast and equipped with the latest functionality.

Update WordPress themes step-by-step plan

1. Log in to your WordPress website.
2. Click on “view” and then “themes”.
3. Then click the “update now” button to update the theme to the latest version.

Update WordPress plugins

To also ensure that all plugins are secure, fast and feature the latest functionality, you need to update them as well. For this we have also created a roadmap to safely and quickly update all your plugins to the latest versions!

Update WordPress plugins roadmap

1. Log in to your WordPress website.
2. Click on “plugins” and then “installed plugins”.
3. Then on the left side, select all plugins that need an update. Try to check everything here.
4. Then click on “bulk actions” and then “update” to update all plugins. This process will take a few minutes, but after that your entire website will be completely up to date.

WordPress cleanup

Now that you’ve updated the entire website, plugins and themes in WordPress maintenance, it’s also a great time to clean up WordPress. By this we mean that the following things:

• Remove unused plugins
• Remove unused themes
• Remove revisions (post versions)

With these things you make sure that your website becomes faster, but also more secure. Old themes and plugins are often not or no longer supported and actively developed and contain security issues, problems and slowdown factors.

Therefore it is wise that during a maintenance moment like now, you check and clean these things up!