A website is not a “set it and forget it” asset. Even a simple site benefits from regular attention, catching small issues before they become bigger ones, keeping software current, and making sure everything still works the way it did when it launched. This checklist covers what we recommend reviewing every month, whether you manage your site yourself or just want to understand what a managed plan is handling on your behalf.
Update WordPress Core, Themes, and Plugins
Check for available updates and apply them, ideally within a few days of release rather than letting them accumulate. Before updating anything significant, especially a major version update, take a quick backup first so you can roll back easily if something breaks. See Plugin Updates: Why Skipping Them Is the Number One Cause of Hacked Sites for why this specific habit matters more than almost anything else on this list.
Confirm Your Backups Are Actually Running
Do not just assume your backup schedule is working, check that a recent backup genuinely exists and, periodically, that it can actually be restored. A backup system that has quietly failed for months without anyone noticing offers no real protection when you eventually need it.
Test Your Site’s Key Functions
Click through your most important pages and features yourself: your contact form, your checkout process if you sell online, your booking widget if you take appointments. It is surprisingly common for a form or plugin to silently stop working, sometimes for weeks, before anyone notices, quietly costing leads or sales the whole time.
Check Your Site’s Loading Speed
Run your homepage and a couple of key pages through a free tool like Google PageSpeed Insights. A gradual slowdown often creeps in unnoticed as more content, plugins, and images accumulate over time, and catching it early is easier than fixing months of buildup at once.
Review Recent Comments and Form Submissions for Spam
If your site accepts comments or form submissions, a quick monthly review catches spam that may have slipped past your filters, and confirms genuine inquiries are not being missed among the noise.
Check Disk Space and Email Storage
A quick look at your account’s disk usage in cPanel can flag a mailbox quietly filling up with large attachments, or a backup folder accumulating unnecessarily, before either becomes an actual problem. See How to Check Your Disk Space and Bandwidth Usage.
Review Who Has Access
Check your list of WordPress admin users and remove anyone who no longer needs access, whether that is a former employee, an old contractor, or an account you no longer recognize. Unused access is unnecessary risk sitting on your site with no upside.
Check for Broken Links
Content shifts over time, pages get renamed or removed, and external sites you have linked to occasionally disappear. A broken link checker plugin or free online tool can flag these quickly, and fixing them protects both visitor experience and your search rankings.
Glance at Your Analytics
A monthly look at your traffic trends can surface issues worth investigating, a sudden drop that might indicate a technical problem, or a spike worth understanding so you can lean into whatever caused it.
Confirm Your SSL Certificate Is Current
This should renew automatically through AutoSSL on Farm 6 Hosting accounts, but a quick glance at the padlock icon in your browser costs nothing and rules out one more thing. See How to Install a Free SSL Certificate (AutoSSL).
Making This Actually Happen
The hardest part of a maintenance checklist is not the tasks themselves, it is remembering to do them consistently every month. Put a recurring reminder on your calendar, or better, hand this list to whoever manages your website day to day so it is not left to memory. If none of this sounds like something you want to own indefinitely, this entire checklist, and more, is exactly what Farm 6 Hosting’s managed plans handle automatically.
See DIY vs. Managed Hosting: What’s Included and What Isn’t to see the full comparison.
