Weekly WordPress Maintenance Checklist

Updating WordPress and plugins to keep the site secure.

Introduction:

Website:

Create a new issue in the WEB project on JIRA

See if there are new versions for WordPress or any plugins

Create a PR with the updates

Assign the issue to your manager

Public Process Street:

The same steps as the website section, except for PUB

Help Site:

The same steps as the website section, except for HH

Sources:

Related checklists:

Introduction:

WordPress is a remarkably secure platform as long as you follow best practices and keep everything up to date. However, old plugins or themes can contain security vulnerabilities. In fact, this is often part of the reason why the developers ship updates.

It's easy to make sure WordPress is secure if you follow this weekly WordPress maintenance checklist. Make sure to edit it and swap out the names of our sub-domains with any you have that need checking in addition to the main site.

Website:

Create a new issue in the WEB project on JIRA

Make it a "Task" issue and name it something like "Weekly WordPress maintenance".

[Add a link to create an issue here]

1

Set a temporary description in order to advance the issue
2

Set the Story Points to 0
3

Set the Sprint to current sprint
4

Click Ready for Estimation and Ready for Engineering

See if there are new versions for WordPress or any plugins

Go the the root of the web project and type:

composer update --dry-run

If there are package updates, it will have an output like this:

Loading composer repositories with package information
Updating dependencies (including require-dev)
 - Updating wpackagist-plugin/akismet (3.1.8) to wpackagist-plugin/akismet (3.1.9)

 - Updating wpackagist-plugin/wpsso (3.28.3) to wpackagist-plugin/wpsso (3.28.4.2)

Paste this output into the JIRA issue description. For each plugin that needs updating, paste in the new changes (not the whole change log) and make note of anything that potentially might break the site.