9: Maintenance
A note on maintaining the website – things to do, things to watch out for, and how to best ‘protect’ yourself to handle issues.
Last updated
A note on maintaining the website – things to do, things to watch out for, and how to best ‘protect’ yourself to handle issues.
Last updated
Maintenance is important for keeping your site secure and up-to-date with ever-changing technical requirements. I’d strongly recommend running updates when prompted. If you see this circular arrow icon up top (to the right of my name in this image):
That means you have updates – whether plugin, theme, WordPress version or whatever the case may be. Click it. You’ll go to a screen that looks something like this:
Depending on what you need to update, it may be as simple as a button click or you may have to check the box of what you want to update and then click the corresponding button to actually run the update. I’d say you should always run the updates, with one caveat...
It’s possible that an update can break your site. Very uncommon, but it can happen for any number of reasons. Before running an update, it may be advisable to create a backup first. This site is using a plugin called All-in-One Backups for this, so click on it from the Dashboard and then click Export To > File to create a full backup:
To restore a backup, you would go to All-in-One WP Migration > Backups, hover over the backup in question, and click Restore.
Now, I have seen restores fail, especially for sites as large as this one, so you may need to call in a developer if something goes wrong. For that reason, it’s good to know you have someone you can contact – whether that’s a freelancer like myself (Sam, Rhineland.co) or a trained staff member – in case something does go wrong.
You don’t want too many backups clogging up your server. I wouldn’t keep more than the latest one or two at any given time. To delete backups, hover over the red X of the one you want to delete and click it.
For anything not covered here, you may just need to bring in a WordPress developer – no shortcuts sometimes.
You’re free to reach out to me to check my availability, which you can do either here:
Or by emailing info[at]rhineland[dot]co.
I don’t have experience with this myself, but I suppose I would Google for WordPress freelancers and see what I found:
I imagine a site like Upwork or Fiverr or something like that might be your best bet – read the reviews, look at the pricing and see what you find if this is the route you take.
