Maintaining your WordPress site yourself, or not?

Below, you'll find what that routine takes, what often goes wrong, and how I'd make the call.

What counts as WordPress maintenance

Maintenance is everything that keeps your site secure and working, even when you don't change anything yourself. It comes down to five things:

• Updates: bringing WordPress itself, your plugins, and your theme up to date with new versions.
• Backups: a regular copy of your whole site that you can restore when you need it.
• Security: closing security holes with updates and keeping your admin accounts and passwords in order.
• Monitoring: noticing when your site is down, when your SSL certificate is about to expire, or when new error messages appear.
• Recovery: getting your site running again when an update or something else breaks it.

The confusion is in the word "management." For one provider, WordPress management means exactly the same as maintenance. For another, it also includes editing your text and pages. So ask what someone means by it.

What maintenance isn't: creating new pages, redesigning your site, or writing your copy. That's different work. Whether it's in a package depends on the provider. What else to look out for is covered in the guide on what belongs in a good maintenance contract.

Doing it yourself: what it takes and what goes wrong

Doing your own maintenance is mostly about rhythm. Check once a week whether updates are waiting. If an update closes a security hole, don't leave it until the end of the month.

On top of that, go through the full checklist below once a month. Pick a moment when you have time to fix something, so not on a Friday afternoon.

You need three things for it: a way to make and restore a backup yourself (through your hosting or with a backup plugin), an administrator account in WordPress, and the discipline to keep doing it in a busy month. An example from my own practice, October 2026: a theme update on a client site broke the header and the slider. The visual check after the update showed it, and I put back the copy from right before the update. If you do it yourself, you need to have that copy and that check in place beforehand.

The difficult work rarely causes the trouble. Three ordinary things do.

Updating without a fresh backup

You update everything at once and one plugin breaks your site. Then your last backup turns out to be a week old. Or you don't know where it is. So make a new backup right before each round of updates, and check where it ends up.

A backup that's never been restored

A backup is only worth something if you can restore it. If you've never tried, you'll only find out whether it works on the day you need it. That's a bad day to learn how. So practice restoring once, at a quiet moment, for example on a test copy if your host offers one.

Dismissing a WordPress warning for months

WordPress runs on a programming language on your server (PHP). If your server runs an old version of it, WordPress tells you so in the dashboard. You can dismiss that notice for months without anything happening.

But at some point, an old version stops getting security updates. And the longer you wait, the bigger the jump to a new version. A big jump is more likely to break an old theme or an old plugin. So plan that switch as a separate job, with a backup first.

Would you rather not do this yourself? The guide on costs explains what it costs to have it done for you.

The monthly checklist if you do it yourself

Ten items. Go through them every month, in this order.

1. Make a fresh backup. Of your whole site, so files and database. Make sure you also know how to restore it.
2. Run updates one at a time, smallest first. Do a new major version, for example from version 4 to version 5, last and on its own. Check your site after each step, so you know which update broke something.
3. Test what your visitors use yourself. Your homepage, your contact form, and for an online store, the cart and checkout page.
4. Check your versions. Which version of WordPress, your plugins, and the programming language on your server are you running? Has anything been waiting weeks for an update?
5. Replace plugins that haven't been updated in a long time. A plugin that hasn't had an update in years, or that was removed from wordpress.org, won't get a fix if it has a security hole either.
6. Review your administrators. Do you recognize every name on the list? Remove the accounts of people who no longer work for you.
7. Check your SSL certificate and your domain name. See whether your certificate renews automatically and when your domain name is due for renewal.
8. Don't dismiss error messages in the dashboard. Read them and find out what they mean. If last month's message is still there, that's your first job.
9. Send a test message through your form. Check that it arrives, and look in your spam folder too.
10. Write down what you did and when. Which updates, which versions, what you tested. If something goes wrong next week, you know where to look.

When outsourcing makes sense, and when it doesn't

My rule is simple. If a broken site costs you customers or revenue, have it maintained. If your site is mostly an online business card that you keep up yourself, do it yourself.

Does your site match two rows that give different advice? Then look back honestly: have you done a round every month for the past three months? If not, have it done for you. If you have, you can handle it yourself.

Three types of providers

If you outsource it, you'll come across roughly three types of providers. The amounts below are per month for one site, as providers listed them on their own websites in October 2026.

The person who built your site

The upside: they know your site and your theme. They also know why something was built the way it was. The downside: building is different work from maintaining. Someone who is busy with new build projects often doesn't have time for it.

A maintenance service without hosting

The upside: you keep your current hosting and only pay for the maintenance. Budget services start at €12.50 per month. For that, you usually get a fixed round of updates, without a test beforehand. If you want a person who keeps an eye on things and steps in, you're more likely looking at €44 to €65.

The downside: you arrange your hosting yourself. If your site goes down, it can bounce back and forth between your host and your maintenance provider over who should fix it.

Maintenance with hosting included

The upside: one party for your server and your site, so nobody can point at someone else. A minority of providers work this way. I'm one of them. With the other providers of this type, it starts at around €45 for one site, with a person involved.

The downside: your site moves to their server. If you want to leave later, you move hosting and maintenance in one go. How that works in my case is covered in outsource WordPress maintenance, hosting included.

Whichever type you choose, the ten questions to ask before you sign are in the guide on maintenance contracts.

How I do it

In my setup, one person takes care of your hosting and your maintenance: me. Your site lives on my own server in the Netherlands.

Before an update, my own management system first makes a copy of what's about to change. After the update, it checks that your most important pages still load. If something goes wrong, a fixed rule puts that copy back automatically. On an online store with new orders, only the files go back.

From €39 per month excl. VAT. Cancel monthly, no annual contract. See outsource WordPress maintenance for the packages and How it works for the steps.

Frequently asked questions