Can I manage my WordPress site myself?

WordPress was released in May 2003. Now more than 20+ years on, it’s still the most popular website content management system (CMS) in the world. With it’s popularity growing, WordPress owns around 63.3% market share of the entire CMS market. It also takes credit for 36% of the world’s top 1 million websites by traffic and 43.2% of all websites on the internet use WordPress today

This speaks volumes about its versatility, user-friendliness, and scalability for businesses and individuals alike. If you have chosen to have a WordPress site you have made a very good choice.

With this in mind however, WordPress is significantly more likely to be a target of hackers, which means you need to more to keep your site safe and secure. To safeguard your WordPress site, you need to put aside some time to perform daily, weekly and monthly tasks and adopt a proactive maintenance routine.

To manage your own WordPress website, here are some key steps to follow:

Daily Tasks

1. Monitor Site Activity: Regularly check your site’s activity logs for any unusual or suspicious activity. Plugins like WP Activity Log can help track changes, user actions and login activity.
2. Check for Security Alerts: Use security plugins such as Wordfence or Sucuri to monitor for security threats and alerts. Respond promptly to any warnings or alerts about potential vulnerabilities. The use of these plugins is not a silver bullet, but they do a good job in general. Make sure your site scanned every day.
3. Scan for Malware: Perform a full daily site scan for malware and vulnerabilities using security plugins like Wordfence or Sucuri. Address any identified issues promptly. Don’t put them off until you come back from holidays.
4. Backup Your Site: Ensure your site is backed up daily. Automatic backup solutions like UpdraftPlus can simplify this process. Make sure you store your backups in a secure, offsite location and not on the same server your website is hosted on.

Weekly Tasks

1. Update WordPress Core, Plugins, and Themes: Check for updates to WordPress core, plugins, and themes at least once a week. Apply these updates to ensure you are protected against the latest vulnerabilities. Don’t simply enable Automatic WordPress updates because that’s not good enough for the following reasons:
   1. Active License Requirements: Many WordPress relay on the use of commercial plugins.  Commercial plugins and themes are usually professionally supported and maintained and will require an active license to receive and obtain software updates. Automatic updates won’t work if the license has expired, leaving your site vulnerable to security risks and bugs associated with outdated software. Often you will not receive any automated or visual indications that updates are available, so you need to check these manually by looking at the changelogs.
   2. Testing Before Updating: Automatic updates do not account for potential conflicts between new updates and existing site configurations. Without testing updates in a staging environment first, you risk site malfunctions or downtime which is not unusual.
   3. Update Management: Some updates might need to be handled manually, especially major updates that could affect the site’s design or functionality. Even if you have an active license, many commercial plugins and themes don’t support automatic updates. You will need to check the changelogs and perform manual updates on a weekly basis at a minimum.
2. Review Plugin and Theme Status: Review the status of your plugins and themes. Remove any that are no longer in use or have not been updated in a long time, as they can be security risks. Watch out for themes and plugins that are abandoned and/or no longer maintained by the developers. There is no regulation or quality control for the development of plugins and themes so make sure the plugins and themes you are using have a good track record. Look for user ratings and support forums for the plugins and themes. These give you a good indication of what others in the community think of them.
3. Monitor Site Performance: Use performance monitoring tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to check your site’s performance. Address any issues that could slow down your site. These issues are critical if your business and website has competitors, because google will favor and prioritize search results based on the speed and performance of your site.
4. Review User Accounts: Regularly review user accounts and roles. Ensure only authorized users have access and remove any unnecessary accounts, particularly those with administrative privileges.
5. Check for Broken Links: Use tools like Broken Link Checker to identify and fix any broken links on your site, improving user experience and SEO.

Additional Security Measures

In addition to above I strongly recommend these be performed on a monthly basis as a minimum:

1. Implementing Strong Passwords: Enforce the use of strong, unique passwords for all user accounts. Consider using a password manager to manage and generate secure passwords.  Consider implementing two-factor authentication for all user accounts, adding an extra layer of security.
2. Limit Login Attempts: Use plugins like Login LockDown to limit the number of login attempts, preventing brute force attacks. our users, enhancing security.
3. Regularly Audit Your Security Settings: Periodically review and update your security settings. Ensure your firewall, security plugins, and check error log files for any issues.
4. Regularly Audit Your Hosting Security Settings: Periodically review and update your security settings on your hosting server. Most hosting companies use a control panel such as cPanel . Ensure the following:
   1. Review your firewall, security settings and make any necessary configuration changes.
   2. Examine web server and PHP logs and respond promptly to any warnings or errors.
   3. Make sure your site is using the latest version of PHP. Outdated PHP versions lack security patches, compromising site security. Upgrading PHP ensures better performance, compatibility, and security, essential for a stable and reliable WordPress site.
   4. Make sure you you are not hosting any more than one website per hosting account. As tempting as it is to save money on hosting costs, hosting more than one website is highly discouraged. Hackers will exploit the the weakest link in the chain, so If you host more than one website, it only takes one website to get hacked and hackers will gain full access to all the sites If you a staging site installed for development purposes it must be maintained just like your main website. In our experience once staging sites are setup, they are often forgotten about. Hackers know this all too well.

Backup and Disaster Recovery Plan

1. Regular Backups: Ensure backups are created and stored securely, both on-site and off-site. Regularly test your backups to ensure they can be restored successfully.
2. Disaster Recovery Plan: Develop and maintain a disaster recovery plan that outlines steps to take in case of a security breach or other catastrophic event. Ensure all team members are familiar with the plan.

By following these daily and weekly practices, you can significantly reduce the risk of your WordPress site being hacked and keep your data secure. Regular maintenance and proactive security measures are essential for the well-being and longevity of your website.

Maintaining a WordPress website is crucial for several reasons, primarily revolving around security, functionality, and overall website performance. As long as you have the time, technical skills and discipline, you can manage your own WordPress site. You will also need to be disciplined with your time and place a high priority to required tasks because hackers don’t sleep!. It’s a race between attackers and defenders and you have a limited window of opportunity to rush and implement a software update or patch, because the attackers move very quickly to exploit unpatched websites.

If you don’t have the skills, time or inclination to maintain your own site then outsource it someone that does.