WordPress is flexible and approachable. However, its massive scale paints a target on your site and magnifies small mistakes. Today, WordPress powers about 43.4 percent of all websites, so your risk surface grows with the ecosystem’s size and pace.
Because downtime threatens revenue and reputation, you need habits that are simple, repeatable, and grounded in evidence. Hence, this guide speaks directly to you as a WordPress site owner who prefers clarity over jargon.
Together, we’ll go through nine things you’re doing wrong with WordPress site management that are adversely impacting your business website. We’ll help you figure out the best ways to improve how your site performs. Let’s get started!
1. No Backup System
You never plan to restore a site. Instead, you plan so restoration is fast when something breaks in production. Credible benchmarks estimate small business downtime between 137 and 427 dollars per minute, while larger organizations routinely exceed 300,000 dollars per hour.
You should set automated full-site and database backups on a schedule, and keep copies off-site to avoid correlated failures. In addition, you must rehearse a quarterly restore, because a practiced process converts a catastrophe into a brief interruption that customers barely notice.
2. Out-of-Date Plugins and Themes
In 2024, researchers logged 7,966 new WordPress ecosystem vulnerabilities, a 34 percent increase over 2023, with the vast majority in third-party plugins. Real incidents show the real impact. For example, the Post SMTP flaw left about 160,000 sites exposed weeks after a patch existed.
We highly recommend you maintain a lightweight update plan that inventories plugins monthly, prefers actively maintained alternatives, and tests updates in staging. As a result, you reduce exposure from abandonware and lower the chance that a quiet plugin bug becomes tomorrow’s emergency.
3. Old PHP Version or Ignored PHP Warnings
If you are still on PHP 7.4, note that it has reached end of life, which means no community security fixes are provided. WordPress directs you to check your version in Tools, then Site Health, and to move to a supported PHP 8 release.
Upgrade in staging, watch for deprecations, and aim for warning-free logs before switching to production. In addition, you should test critical flows such as checkout and contact forms, since they often reveal incompatibilities that simple page loads will miss.
Not being able to understand “PHP Update Recommended” isn’t a reason to ignore it. If you update your themes and plugins, but not PHP, your website may stop working.
4. Too Many Administrator Accounts
Verizon’s 2025 DBIR highlights that about 88 percent of Basic Web Application Attacks involved stolen credentials, and around 22 percent of breaches began with credential abuse.
We suggest you audit users quarterly, remove ex-staff promptly, and apply least privilege so Editors edit and Admins administer. Additionally, require multi-factor authentication on privileged accounts and enable login notifications.
With tighter roles and stronger authentication, you shrink the blast radius from one phished password and gain earlier visibility into suspicious activity.
5. Weak Passwords
Microsoft reports that multifactor authentication can block more than 99.2 percent of account compromise attacks, which is an extraordinary risk reduction for minimal effort.
Make sure you require long, unique passwords through a manager, and enable MFA for all administrators and editors immediately. Moreover, limit login attempts and disable username enumeration to make brute force attacks noisy and unprofitable.
When you combine MFA with basic hygiene, you neutralize the vast majority of identity-based intrusions that routinely topple web applications.
6. No Reliable Help When Things Go Wrong
Even modest incidents can burn hundreds of dollars per minute for small businesses, which quickly eclipses the cost of light-touch support. To curb them, appoint an internal owner or retain a managed WordPress partner who watches updates, reads PHP warnings, and can roll back gracefully.
Also, document escalation steps and vendor contacts so progress continues when you are unavailable. With clear ownership and a short runbook, you shorten downtime windows and avoid the paralysis that often accompanies unfamiliar error messages.
7. A Set-and-Forget Mindset
The mindset is a slow drift that raises risk each month you skip maintenance. We suggest you put a recurring maintenance window on your calendar for updates, quick scans, and user audits, then actually honor it.
Additionally, favor vendors with visible development activity and remove redundant plugins annually. Because attacks track disclosures closely, this steady cadence keeps your stack modern and lowers the likelihood that a known bug becomes your incident.
8. Unpleasant or Outright Spammy Comments
A 2024 spam study estimated that 69 percent of website spam targets WordPress, largely because it dominates the CMS market. If you will not moderate quickly, disable comments site-wide; otherwise, require approval and deploy reputable anti-spam tools.
Akismet, for example, advertises 99.99 percent detection accuracy, which greatly reduces manual cleanup and moderates at scale. In addition, set clear house rules and close comments on stale posts, since age and policy both reduce drive-by abuse.
9. The Search Engine Visibility Checkbox
In Settings, then Reading, the option labeled “discourage search engines from indexing this site” asks crawlers not to index pages, which is appropriate for staging and disastrous on production.
Confirm that it is unchecked on your live site, and verify indexing in Search Console after every launch or migration. Trusted hosts and WordPress guides document this behavior clearly.
As an extra guard, review robots.txt after migrations, so accidental directives do not block important content.
Keep it Simple, Make it Repeatable!
If we were you, we’d start with resilience by setting automated off-site backups and rehearsing restores, because that one practice converts failures into short interruptions. Then reduce exposure by pruning abandoned plugins, updating the rest on a cadence, and moving to supported PHP 8 for both security and performance.
Next, lock down identities through role hygiene, strong passwords, and MFA, since stolen credentials dominate real-world web application breaches. Finally, double-check search visibility after every launch or migration, and keep comments tidy unless you moderate actively. With these small, repeatable steps, you keep your site reliable, visible, and trustworthy without becoming the entire IT department.
