In order to keep your website up and running you need to take care of various things: content creation, maintenance, security checks, malware cleanup, backups, comments moderation and more that needs to be done. But you don’t have to do it all by yourself. There are tools available to help you automate WordPress tasks, and if you need additional service you can always hire a professional WordPress developer to take care of it.
Now, if you are a DIY person or you simply want to save some time in managing your website yourself, here are a number of different ways you can automate WordPress tasks to save yourself some time and money. 🙂
Updates
We all have plugin updates on hold but why is that? Are plugin updates really that terrible or time-consuming for website owners? Well yeah! If you are like me and have dozens of WordPress websites that use pretty much the same WP plugins, then updating all those plugins can be time-consuming.. That’s why plugin updates are a task that should be the first to automatize on your WordPress website.
But what about Theme or even WordPress Core updates, should those be also automatized? Well… Not really. Most of us have some custom added to our themes, (most commonly inside our theme header.php, style.css and functions.php files) and also that is a bad practice, to add code directly into the parent theme and not the child one or even using custom code plugins, that keeps our websites plugin usage on the minimum and increases our website speed. That is why if you have any custom modifications done to your theme, you should not enable automatic updates for your active theme!
Same thing goes for WordPress core, updates can go wrong and break your site, so you should always perform them at the time when you have least visitors (night time).