Insurance you hope never to claim
A backup is a complete stored state of your site, its content and its database, taken at a point in time. If something goes badly wrong, that state can be put back. Everything else in maintenance is convenience. This is the part that determines whether a bad day costs an hour or a fortnight.
The three questions to ask once
- How often does a backup run, and does it include both files and the database?
- Where is it stored, and is that somewhere other than the same server the site runs on?
- How far back can a restore go, and who performs it?
Write the answers next to your domain and hosting notes. A backup nobody has ever tested restoring is a hope, not a plan, so it is entirely reasonable to ask your support contact to demonstrate a restore once.
Updates, in the right order
WordPress core, the theme and plugins release updates that include security fixes. Skipping them for a year is how sites get compromised. The safe sequence never changes.
- Confirm a recent backup exists
- Apply the updates
- Load the home page, one service page and the contact page
- Submit the contact form
- Look at the site on a phone as well as a desktop
If a page looks wrong afterwards, stop and report it with the name of what was updated. That one detail usually identifies the cause immediately.
Basic security hygiene
- A long, unique password for your administrator account, stored in a password manager rather than a diary
- Two-factor authentication switched on if available
- Individual logins per person, never a shared one
- Remove users the day they stop working with you
- Never log in to the dashboard over unfamiliar public wifi
When something breaks
Do not keep clicking. Note what you were doing, the exact error wording, the time, and whether it happens on another device or another network. Send that with your request for help. Resist the urge to deactivate plugins at random to see what happens, because that turns a small problem into a longer one and destroys the evidence that would have identified it.
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