How long does WordPress maintenance take? (Beginner’s Guide)

Maintaining a WordPress site is important to ensure its security, performance and overall integrity, but it can be time-consuming. That’s why one of the most common questions from beginners is: how long does WordPress maintenance take?

We have been helping users maintain their WordPress sites for many years and our experience shows that the time frame depends on the size of the site and the maintenance tasks you perform.

For example, running regular updates or backups shouldn’t take more than a few minutes, but if custom development is required to optimize your site, it could take a whole day, a week, or even a month.

In this guide, we’ll take a look at the different WordPress maintenance periods and what they entail.

We discuss the different factors that affect WordPress maintenance time, but here’s a quick breakdown of how long tasks should take to complete.

You can also see how often you should perform each maintenance task.

What is WordPress Maintenance?

WordPress maintenance is a series of tasks that keep your website running smoothly and securely. Think of your website as a car, and maintenance tasks are like regular maintenance to keep everything running smoothly.

These tasks include updating WordPress core, themes and plugins, creating backups, running security checks, optimizing performance, managing content, and more.

Neglecting these tasks can leave your site vulnerable to security vulnerabilities, slow down its performance, and even cause downtime. You want your site to run smoothly so that users have a great experience, which is why maintenance is so important.

However, the amount of time required for maintenance depends on several factors, including the size and complexity of your website, the frequency of updates, and your technical expertise. Let’s look at these in detail.

Factors affecting WordPress maintenance time

The length of your WordPress maintenance depends on several factors, such as:

• Size and complexity of the site: Larger websites and eCommerce stores with more pages, posts, media files, and complex features typically require more time to maintain. High-traffic sites may also require more resources and more frequent attention.
• Frequency of content updates: Active websites that regularly publish new content may require more time to maintain than static corporate websites.
• Number of plugins and themes: Websites with numerous plugins and themes require more time for testing and updates to avoid conflicts.
• hosting quality: Managed WordPress hosting can reduce maintenance overhead compared to shared or VPS hosting, but a site using shared hosting may require more personalized attention.

Now let’s see how long WordPress maintenance lasts.

Time to complete WordPress maintenance tasks

There are many maintenance tasks involved in managing your WordPress website. We’ve broken them down to give you an estimate of the time it will take to complete each task.

Simple daily tasks

• Comment moderation: (5-10 minutes) Review and approve or delete comments regularly to maintain engagement and keep spam out.
• Content updates or minor changes: (10-20 minutes) You can make small updates to your site content daily or as needed.
• Operating time monitoring: (5-10 minutes) Checking server uptime ensures that your website is available to users on the Internet. You can use several tools to check WordPress server uptime.

Weekly or bi-weekly tasks

• Plugin and theme updates: (15-30 minutes) Make sure your plugins and themes are up to date to take advantage of the latest features and security patches.
• Securing the website: (10-15 minutes) Regular WordPress backups are essential. Creating backups manually can take longer, but setting up an automatic backup schedule makes the process easier and faster.
• Performance tests: (10-20 minutes) Test your site speed and make any necessary adjustments to maintain optimal performance. However, optimizing your site for faster loading times may take more time as you may need to hire a developer.

Monthly tasks

• Security scans: (20-30 minutes) Conduct thorough security scans to identify and remediate vulnerabilities.
• Checking for broken links: (10-15 minutes) Checking for broken links is another task you should do regularly. Tools like AIOSEO Broken Link Checker can help you quickly find and fix dead links.
• Database optimization: (10-20 minutes) Clean up your database to improve your website performance. You can use various plugins to optimize WordPress database.

Quarterly or semi-annual tasks

• Full website audit: (1-2 hours) Conduct a comprehensive review of your site’s functionality, design, and performance. This is a time-consuming task and you will need to use various tools to check the site’s UX and security vulnerabilities.
• Check and update SEO settings: (30-60 minutes) Make sure your SEO settings are up to date to maintain your search engine ranking. You can also perform an SEO audit to get a clear picture of how your website is performing in search engines.
• Important topic updates: (30-60 minutes) Perform major design updates or revisions as needed. This may require updating some designs for better performance and new features.

Tips to Reduce WordPress Maintenance Time

Now that you know how much time it takes to perform various WordPress maintenance tasks, here are some time-saving tips.

1. Establish a regular maintenance schedule

If you maintain your site yourself, it is best to choose a specific time of day/week/month/quarter for different maintenance tasks.

This allows you to focus on running your site more efficiently, saving time and completing other tasks that help grow your business.

2. Use maintenance checklists

It can be difficult to keep track of all the tasks to make sure nothing gets missed.

This is where creating a WordPress maintenance checklist can be helpful. By checking off each task as it’s completed, you won’t waste time switching back and forth between different maintenance tasks.

3. Automate wherever possible

Another way to save WordPress maintenance time is to automate certain tasks.

For example, you can automate backups by scheduling them. With Duplicator, you can easily set up automated backup schedules and save time.

For more information, see our guide on securing your WordPress site.

You can also enable automatic plugin updates to save time.

This way, your important plugins are always up to date and you don’t have to update them manually one by one.

4. Delegate tasks or hire specialists

If you don’t have enough time or expertise, consider outsourcing maintenance tasks to a WordPress support agency. This way, the professionals can take care of everything related to your website behind the scenes.

For example, our WPBeginner WordPress maintenance services are some of the best and most affordable maintenance services on the market. Our team of experts can handle all aspects of WordPress maintenance, giving you peace of mind and more time to focus on growing your business.

With WPBeginner Pro Services, you can relax while our experts handle all maintenance tasks efficiently. You get regular updates, access to 24/7 support, uptime monitoring, cloud backups, malware scanning and monitoring, and more.

Besides, you can take WPBeginner emergency WordPress support if your website is down or encounters unexpected issues. Our team will help you fix the problem and get your website back up and running in no time.

We hope this article helped you learn how long WordPress maintenance lasts. You may also want to read our guides on how to fix WordPress in maintenance mode or how to contact WordPress support.

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