You do not want to pay someone for every small thing, and you do not want to break your own website either. Fair enough. A lot of upkeep needs no technical knowledge at all, only a browser, half an hour and the habit of doing it. Some of it, though, looks simple and is not.
This post sorts the website maintenance tasks you can do yourself into three groups by risk: jobs anyone can do without logging in, jobs that are safe inside WordPress if you go carefully, and jobs that look easy but are better left to someone who does them every day. For each one there is a short how-to, so you can start this week.
Group one: jobs you can do without logging in
These cannot break anything, because you are only looking. They are also the jobs most often skipped, because nobody is assigned to them.
Send yourself an enquiry
Open your contact page on your phone, fill in the form with your own details and a note such as “test, please ignore”, and submit it. Then check three things: did the thank-you message appear, did the email arrive in the inbox it is supposed to reach, and did it land in spam? Forms stop delivering without any visible error on the site, so this is the single most valuable check on the list. Do it after any change to the site or the hosting, and regularly in between.
Read your own site as a stranger would
Pick three pages a month and read them properly, on a phone. Are the phone number, address and opening hours correct? Do the prices match what you actually charge? Is a staff member who left still listed? Does a “new” service from three years ago still say new? A wrong phone number loses an enquiry just as surely as a broken form, and nothing in the dashboard will warn you about it.
Click every button on the homepage
Every button, every menu item, the logo, the WhatsApp icon, the social links. Anything that goes nowhere or to the wrong place gets written down. For a fuller sweep, the free broken link checker tests every link on a page and reports the ones that return errors.
Check the padlock
Open your site and look at the address bar. If the browser shows a warning instead of a normal secure connection, the certificate may have expired or been set up incorrectly. The SSL certificate checker shows when your certificate expires, so you can see trouble coming rather than meeting it.
Time how long the homepage takes
Run your homepage through the website speed test and note the result in a spreadsheet with the date. One reading means little. A series over several months shows whether the site is slowly getting heavier, which is much easier to deal with early.
Make sure Search Console messages reach you
If your site is set up in Google Search Console, Google sends messages there about indexing problems, manual actions and security issues, and can email them to the people listed on the property. Check that your own address is one of them, not only the developer who set it up years ago. Then, when an email arrives about pages that cannot be indexed, forward it to whoever handles the technical side rather than leaving it in a folder.
Keep your renewal dates in a calendar
Domain, hosting, any paid plugin licences, the certificate if it is not automatic. Log in to each account once, note the renewal date, and put a reminder in your calendar a few weeks ahead. Expired domains take sites and email offline at the same moment, and it is entirely avoidable.
Group two: DIY website maintenance inside WordPress
These involve logging in, so there is a small chance of a mistake. Each is safe if you follow the steps and do not improvise.
Review who has access
Go to Users in the WordPress dashboard. Look at every account with the Administrator role. Do you recognise each one? Former staff, old developers and agencies you no longer work with should not still have admin access. If you are unsure about one, change its role to Subscriber rather than deleting it, and ask your developer. Deleting a user asks what to do with their content, so read that screen carefully if you go ahead.
Read the Site Health screen
Under Tools, WordPress has a Site Health page that lists critical issues and recommended improvements. You do not need to fix anything yourself. Just read it, take a screenshot, and pass on anything marked critical to whoever looks after the technical side.
Clear out spam comments
If your site allows comments, the Comments screen can fill up with spam. Emptying the spam folder is harmless. If comments are not used at all, ask whether they can be turned off for the whole site.
Edit the content you own
Text, photos, opening hours, team pages, blog posts. This is your business’s information and it makes sense for you to keep it current. Two habits make it safe: preview before publishing, and know that WordPress keeps revisions of posts and pages, so most edits can be rolled back from the editor’s revision history if something goes wrong.
Look at the backup log
If your site uses a backup plugin, its screen usually shows when the last backup ran and whether it succeeded. You are not restoring anything, only confirming the backups are happening. A failed or missing backup is worth an immediate message to whoever manages the site.
Group three: jobs that look easy but are not
These are the tasks where a one-click button hides real risk. Owners do them all the time, and most of the time nothing goes wrong. When it does, it is usually bad.
Clicking “Update all”
Updating every plugin at once is quick, and on a simple site it often works. When it does not, you have changed many things together and cannot tell which one broke the page. On a store or booking site, an update to a payment or booking plugin can change how checkout behaves. If you update yourself, do it one plugin at a time, after a backup, and check the important pages after each one.
Changing the PHP version
Most hosting panels let you switch PHP versions from a drop-down menu. It takes a second, and if a plugin or theme is not compatible, it can take the site down just as fast. Check compatibility first, or leave it to someone who will.
Installing a plugin to fix a problem
A plugin for speed, another for security, a third for SEO, each recommended by a different article. Plugins overlap and conflict, and some add load to every page. Before installing one, ask whether the site already has something that does the job.
Editing DNS records
Changing a record at your domain registrar is a form with a few boxes. Get one wrong and your email stops, or your site points somewhere else, and changes can take time to settle. If a provider asks you to add a record, copy it exactly and change nothing else.
Deleting files to save space
Media files, old themes, things in the hosting file manager that look unused. Some are, some are not. An image that seems unused may be called by a page builder template. Leave this to someone who can check what references what.
Website maintenance tasks you can do yourself each month
If you want one short routine to put in the calendar, this covers most of the value from the first two groups:
- Submit a test enquiry and confirm it arrives.
- Read three pages on your phone and fix anything out of date.
- Click through the homepage buttons.
- Glance at the Users list and the Site Health screen.
- Confirm the last backup ran.
Write down the date and anything odd. That note becomes very useful the day something does break, because you can say “it was fine on the 3rd” instead of “I am not sure when it started”.
Where doing it yourself stops making sense
The jobs in group three are the reason website support and maintenance is sold as a service at all. They need judgement built from doing the same work on many sites, and they go wrong at the worst moments. Plenty of owners keep groups one and two for themselves and hand group three to someone else, which is a sensible split. If you are deciding how to divide the work in a business with staff, the post on keeping upkeep in-house or handing it out goes into that.
There is no shame in doing all three groups yourself if you enjoy it and the site is simple. Just take a backup you know how to restore before you start on the third group, and have a name to call if it goes wrong.
If you want a second pair of eyes
If you have been doing the owner-friendly checks and want to know what you might be missing on the technical side, our no-cost website health check looks at the parts the routine above cannot reach, and tells you plainly what, if anything, needs doing.
If several people in your team will share these jobs, a short WordPress training plan for staff keeps everyone working the same way.
Next in this series: Website Maintenance After Launch: The First 90 Days
