Glossary Terms

WordPress maintenance

Ongoing updates, backups, security scanning, and database optimization keeping a WordPress site secure and reliable.

WordPress maintenance is the ongoing work of keeping a site secure, fast, and reliable: software updates, backup checks, security scanning, database cleanup, and uptime monitoring. A responsible minimum is updating core, plugins, and themes at least monthly and immediately after security patches, confirming that off-site backups are actually completing and can be restored, reviewing the security log for failed logins or suspicious file changes, and periodically clearing out old revisions, transients, and orphaned data. Neglecting it is one of the leading causes of WordPress security incidents, since most compromised sites were running outdated plugins or themes when they were breached. It can be done by hand, handed to a managed host, or outsourced to a maintenance service that owns the update-and-monitor routine for you.

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