How To Maintain Your WordPress Website

How often do you tune up your car? You know, that really expensive piece of equipment you rely on daily to get you all the important places you need to go? Websites are kind of like cars. When they’re working, we tend to forget about them but when they break we’re left stranded.

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Chances are, you’ve been in a transportation pickle or two, so you’ve learned that investing a little time into car maintenance today can keep you from dealing with a vehicle emergency tomorrow. Your website is the same way. Investing a little routine maintenance into your website can save you a headache down the road. And don’t, worry! Website maintenance is easy peasy and we’ll walk you through the most common updates right here.

Quick Guide Links:

Updating WordPress

WordPress is the software that allows you to build a website and manage the content behind the scenes in a content management system.

To check for updates, log in to the admin area of your website and go to Dashboard > Updates. At the top of the page, you will see the info for your current version of WordPress.

If WordPress is up to date, you will see a message telling you which version of WordPress you have installed.

If WordPress needs to be updated, you will see a button with the option to start the update. Click ‘Update Now’ to automatically put your website in maintenance mode and install the latest version of WordPress.

This process will complete automatically on it’s own and you will receive a success message on the same page.

Updating Plugins

Plugins are WordPress software extensions that give your website handy bits of functionality like event listings, form options, or products & shops. Plugin developers are constantly working on keeping their software up to date with WordPress and offering new options to keep their plugin relevant. Plugins are the most common updates your website needs.

To check for updates, log in to the admin area of your website and go to Dashboard > Updates. Below the WordPress version information, you will see the info regarding your current plugins.

If your plugins are up to date, you will see a message telling you just that.

If you have plugins that need updating, you will see a list view of each plugin that needs to be updated.

Check the box to select the plugin or click ‘Select All’ to easily check each plugin. Then click the ‘Update Plugins’.

This will start the automatic process of updating your plugins. Your website will shift to maintenance mode while the update is running and you will see a success message when the update is complete and your site is back to normal.

Updating Themes

Themes are what give your site its mojo. All the colors, styles, fonts, and layout settings are set in your website’s theme.

To check for updates, log in to the admin area of your website and go to Dashboard > Updates. At the bottom of the page, you will see the info for your current theme. If your themes are up to date, you will see a message telling you just that.

If you have a theme that needs updating, you will see a list view of each theme that needs to be updated.

Check the box to select the theme and click the ‘Update Themes’ button.

This will start the automatic process of updating your theme. Your website will shift to maintenance mode while the update is running and you will see a success message when the update is complete and your site is back to normal.

Updating Form Notifications

At CurlyHost, we build websites with two primary types of form builders, Elementor and Gravity Forms.

If your website uses Elementor, you will see an ‘Elementor’ tab in the admin dashboard of your site. If you have this tab, skip to the instructions below for Elementor forms.

If your website uses Gravity Forms, you will see a ‘Forms’ tab in the admin dashboard of your site. If you have this tab, skip to the instructions below for Gravity Forms.

Elementor Forms

To update form notifications for an Elementor form, navigate to the page editor where the form is displayed. A common example of this is a contact page. Using a contact page as an example, login to the admin dashboard of your website and navigate to Pages > Contact (or any other page where your form is displaying), and click ‘Edit with Elementor.’

This will open the page editor for that page.

Hover over the form to highlight it in blue and click on the edit icon in the top right corner to open the editing options in the left hand side menu.

In the editing options in the left sidebar, scroll down to the ‘Email’ option and click to reveal more options.

To update who gets the notification, change the email address in the ‘To’ input field. If you would like to add multiple emails to receive notifications, add more emails with a comma and a space between.

Once your changes are set, click the green ‘Update’ button to save your changes and make them live on the website.

Gravity Forms

To update form notifications for a Gravity form, navigate to Forms in your admin dashboard.

This will bring you to a dashboard of all the forms you have on the site.

Click on the title of the form you want to update. This will open the form editor. At the top of the page, find the ‘Settings’ tab. Hover over it to reveal a sub menu and click the option for ‘Notifications.’