For the most part, your new WordPress site operates maintenance free. However we do have a few suggestions:

  1. Backups after a change to the site: Anytime you make a change to your website, use the XCloner plugin to make a backup of your website. The username and password are included in the list of 3rd party services in this document. You’ll find the XCloner tool in under the Plugins menu once it's been installed.
  2. Regular Backups: Make a regular backup of your website. Using XCloner. How often you make a backup depends on how much information you are willing to loose. If you have a very active site, you will likely want to make backups more often or even automate them. For less active sites, a manual backup every once in a while should suffice.
  3. Restoring from a backup: Any good ISP will make daily backups of your site (both the database and the files) and should be able to work with you to restore your website, sometimes for a fee. However, if for some reason their backups failed on your website, it’s always good to have a backup to your backup plan. While making a backup of the files is a little more involved unless you use a tool like XCloner, you should be able to make a backup of your pages and posts using the WordPress Export menu.
  4. Moderating Blog Comments: While Akismet will do a pretty good job of keeping your blog comments spam free, it will miss some on occasion. We recommend to set your blog so that you need to moderate submitted blog comments. This means that comments won’t appear in your blog pages until you approve them. This ensures that comments are valid and not just spam links to potentially dangerous websites. To configure these settings, click on Settings and then Discussion in the Admin Dashboard.
  5. Updating the Plugins: You can update the plugins on the website automatically. WordPress will notify you in the Admin Dashboard when an update becomes available.
  6. Checking for Broken Links: If you've installer the Broken Link Checker plugin, it will monitor your website for broken links and notify you by email should it find any if configured to do so. This beats scanning your website periodically using a too like Xenu Link Sleuth.
  7. Be very careful about updating your WordPress theme if your web developer customized it. When you update most themes, modifications are usually lost. Check with your web developer to find out if it is safe to update your WordPress theme.

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