WordPress maintenance is often seen as a chore, but it’s extremely important. Most web platforms, without a little extra care, can become slow, error prone and unreliable. From a security perspective, a poorly maintained site can even become a liability. Unnecessary files and data can slow your site down. Unwanted content such as comment spam can cause you a world of hurt, consuming valuable resources and impact on your search engine rankings. Security flaws can enable attackers to use your site to commit fraud, spread malware and launch further attacks.

Regular maintenance is essential for a stable, healthy website.

You should always take your site offline whenever you’re making changes behind the scenes. This is especially true if you have to work on a live site. This will help reduce the likelihood of your users seeing or experiencing anything they shouldn’t while you’re making changes.

WordPress itself does have a native maintenance mode when updates are being applied, but there are also some useful plugins that look a little nicer and give you a few more options that you can enable at any time.

This category of plugins is also commonly referred to as ‘Coming Soon’ or ‘Maintenance Mode’ plugins, so include those terms if you’re looking around for other options.

Software updates are released regularly and they need to be applied to your website to ensure your website functions correctly. In the context of WordPress, we’re referring to WordPress core, themes and plugins. Once updates are applied, it’s always important to test the site to ensure everything is functioning as expected and that there hasn’t been any conflicts.