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I often see that it is referred to as “monthly” maintenance. Does that usually mean you take a day or 2 out of every month to perform maintenance on your websites?
Or do you proactively check to see if your client sites need updating and what not and perform the maintenance immediately?
Sorry if this is a silly question, just curious on what is best practice.
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“monthly maintenance” likely refers to running updates once per month.
If you have more than 2-3 sites, use a site management system like ManageWP, InfiniteWP, MainWP which allow you to deploy updates to all sites in a single click.
Best practice is to run updates soon after they are released – the longer you leave it, the greater the chance you’ll get hacked. Monthly is not sufficient.
I update my clients’ sites every day except on weekends.
Just hearing “WordPress” makes me want to cry! I hired someone to build a website. Used WordPress. (I know nothing about WordPress). One day the website went down. Had an error message. I couldn’t reach the person who initially built it. Then was told there was malware somewhere. It hadn’t been kept up maintenance wise, and the back up was done after the fact. That was the end of that. I wasn’t able to resolve it couldn’t afford to have someone do it. I still have the WordPress deluxe or whatever it’s called. Cost me a pretty penny. That’s what happens when you don’t know what the heck your doing:/
I’ve run daily and weekly backups and daily updates on all my client sites. Store the daily backups offsite for 14 days, the weekly ones for three years. I’ve done this for 10+ years now, up to 100+ sites.
I’ve rarely had problems, but I’m pretty good about first stabilizing sites I take on for maintenance.
There are updates I always hold back on. Big core WordPress updates. Elementor, obviously. A few others. But after the inevitable patch releases I’ll go back on schedule.