Best Practices for Maintaining Client WordPress Sites
Successful maintenance requires client-owned hosting, automated backups, regular security audits, and a disciplined approach to plugin management.
Based on 7 community reports.
Linked sources: 7.
Known Issues
- Plugin bloat leading to performance degradation
- Cache conflicts with dynamic content like forms
- Accessibility regressions after client content updates
Community Q&A
Should I host client sites on my own account?
No, it is recommended to let clients own their hosting to ensure better trust, control, and easier management of site ownership.
How do I handle caching with dynamic forms?
Exclude pages containing forms, checkout, or user-specific content from your caching layer or use cache-busting query parameters.
How can I prevent plugin conflicts during maintenance?
Adopt a ‘one task, one plugin’ philosophy, avoid multipurpose plugins, and keep a documented list of known problematic plugins.
What is the best way to monitor accessibility?
Run automated scans like axe devtools after content updates and perform manual checks on critical components like navigation and forms.
Reddit Sources
- AI is Killing Website Page Builders 🤔 (r/Wordpress)
- Why is it so hard to tell good WordPress development from bad? (r/Wordpress)
- Replacing WordPress plugins with small reusable custom functions – how far do you take it? (r/Wordpress)
- Education material for launching and monitoring sites?? (r/Wordpress)
- The hardest part of custom WordPress work is not building the feature, it’s maintaining it across many sites (r/Wordpress)
- How do you freelancers handle long Varnish/page-cache TTLs with WordPress nonces? (r/Wordpress)
- Anyone here doing ongoing accessibility monitoring on WordPress sites? (r/Wordpress)