How to Manage WordPress Sites: 75 Tasks To Keep Your Site Running Smoothly

Managing a WordPress site means performing daily, weekly and monthly tasks to help your site run smoothly. Use this checklist to help you manage WordPress sites either for yourself or your web design clients.

75 WordPress Site Management Tasks & Tips

The list below includes both one-time tasks for newer WordPress sites and repetitive tasks that will need to be performed on a regular basis.

Download the checklist PDF: The Essential WordPress Maintenance Checklist

WordPress Backup Tasks

1. Install a WordPress backup plugin like BackupBuddy to start running automatic WordPress backups

2. Confirm your automatic WordPress backups are running at scheduled intervals

3. Confirm backups are delivering to a safe, off-site storage destination & set up redundant backups (two or more backup file storage locations)

4. Confirm backup files include WordPress database and all files (media library, themes, plugins, etc.)

5. Consider using Stash Live (real-time WordPress backups) if you manage a more active site

6. Delete any old locally-stored backups (these are backups stored on your own server)

7. Delete old backup files stored off-site in BackupBuddy Stash to reduce storage usage

8. Keep a current version of the ImportBuddy script file on hand

WordPress Security Tasks

9. Update WordPress core to latest version

10. Use a WordPress security plugin like iThemes Security to help perform important WordPress security tasks

11. Run the WordPress Security Check feature to activate recommended WordPress Security features

12. Enable 404 Detection because of phishing and other attempts

13. Enable the Banned Users setting to block specific IP addresses and user agents from accessing your site

14. Review logs of Banned User IPs

15. Enable WordPress brute force protection to protect your site against attackers that try to randomly guess login details to your site

16. Enable Network Brute Force Protection to protect your site against known attackers before they reach your site

17. Run a WordPress Malware Scan

18. Enable User Logging to log user actions such as login, editing or saving content and other actions

19. Disable the File Editor in WordPress Tweaks

20. Harden WordPress by using the Away Mode setting to limit access to your WordPress login and admin area (for example, overnight or while you’re on vacation)

21. Whitelist your own IP Address

22. Review WordPress file permissions

23. Remove the Admin user

24. Change WordPress salts & secret keys

25. Activate and set up WordPress two-factor authentication

WordPress Theme & Plugin Tasks

Note: be sure to run a backup before updating themes, plugins or WordPress core.

26. Confirm premium theme and plugins have current licenses (this is usually how version updates are communicated to your WordPress site)

27. Update current theme to latest version

28. Update active plugins to latest version

29. Delete and completely remove unused themes and plugins

30. Review new plugin and theme features for implementation

Comments Tasks

31. Approve & reply to pending comments

32. Empty spam comments

33. Make sure an anti-spam service like Akismet is activated to help reduce comment spam

Uptime Monitoring Tasks

34. Monitor WordPress uptime to track hosting performance

35. Review uptime/downtime stats for uptime percentage, total downtime and number of downtimes

36. Enable email notifications for downtime

Blog Tasks

37. Add new posts weekly to keep blog fresh

38. Review top-performing posts for improvements

39. Add & confirm email newsletter signup is working

40. Confirm social sharing buttons are working

41. Add featured images to posts

42. Review Post drafts & delete unneeded posts

43. Empty Posts stored in Trash

Image Tasks

44. Optimize images for the web (reduce file sizes for images above 600KB)

45. Delete unused images from the Media Library

46. Review and add alt tags to images in posts and pages

Page Tasks

47. Audit older pages for content updates

48. Empty Pages in Trash

49. Review Pages in Draft

50. Fill unused Widget areas if possible

User Tasks

51. Delete unused or unneeded user accounts

52. Encourage Admin users to enable WordPress two-factor authentication & better WordPress password security

53. WordPress Role Manager: Review user access levels and adjust roles as necessary

54. Encourage Admins / Editors / Contributor Users to set up their Gravatar profile images (anyone that writes content or replies to comments)

Contact Page Tasks

55. Confirm current contact information (Email, Social, Phone, etc.)

56. Review Contact form confirmation email

57. Review Contact form submission delivery

58. Reply to contact form submissions

59. Consider using conditional logic to deliver canned contact form responses

60. Update FAQs to reflect common customer or client questions

Portfolio Tasks

61. Update portfolio with images of latest projects

62. Add new testimonials

SEO & Analytics Tasks

63. Install a WordPress SEO plugin to help with basic SEO

64. Connect Google Analytics and activate Google Search Console for your WordPress site

65. Submit a sitemap for WordPress site

66. Audit Pages and Posts for keyword-focus

67. Add missing meta descriptions to Posts and Pages

68. Review analytics data for total page views and unique visitors

69. Review referral traffic and inbound links

70. Review Google Console data (Search Traffic, Google Index, Crawl)

71. Set up and review Goals in Google Analytics

72. Review Behavior Flow

73. Review Page load times

74. Consider Page Speed suggestions

75. Audit Site for Mobile-responsiveness and usage

Save Time & Manage WordPress Sites with iThemes Sync

Managing WordPress sites can get pretty time-consuming (and maybe overwhelming), especially if you have more than one site.

Using a Using a WordPress maintenance tool like iThemes Sync can save you a lot of time.

With a tool like iThemes Sync, instead of having to log in to each WordPress site you manage, you can have one central dashboard to perform WordPress maintenance tasks.

With Sync, you can perform a lot of the tasks included in the list to manage WordPress sites, like:

Update themes, plugins and WordPress core to the latest versions

Install themes and plugins or deactivate/delete

Run WordPress backups

Add/Edit backup schedules

Manage remote backup files stored in BackupBuddy Stash

Edit Users

Approve and reply to comments

Add new posts and pages

View Uptime stats

View a summary of Google Analytics data

How to Manage WordPress Sites Easily with iThemes Sync

1. To get started with iThemes Sync, grab your 30-day FREE trial here.

2. Login to the Sync dashboard. You can start adding your WordPress sites right from the welcome screen or upload the Sync plugin directly to your WordPress site.

3. Once your WordPress sites have been securely authenticated by Sync, you’ll see a summary of available updates for all your sites and you can start performing other maintenance tasks.

Send WordPress Maintenance Reports with iThemes Sync Pro

If you offer WordPress maintenance packages for your web design clients, Sync Pro allows you to send WordPress maintenance reports to summarize all the actions you took to keep their WordPress site running smoothly. Reports are delivered via email as interactive HTML and can be scheduled to automatically run each month (or day or week).

Here’s an example report (you can check out a live report demo here).

Have something to add? Leave a comment or tweet us @iThemes.