Weekly Server Security and Maintenance Routine Steps

If you’ve followed my steps for setting up your server and then installing WordOps and creating your WordPress site then you should be up and running by now.

The work on the “technical side” doesn’t end there however, and there are a couple of weekly tasks that you’ll need to do in order to keep your server (and your sites) running nicely. Don’t worry, they literally take 1-2 minutes and I use these exact commands myself.

wo update

This command checks whether there have been any updates released for the WordOps software that we installed on our server. Before you run this command though, I highly recommend checking the WordOps community forums to see if there have been any issues reported with the update – that’s where people will usually post if they are having problems with their WordOps installation.

If the coast looks clear, so to speak, then feel free to run the following command in your server shell prompt:

wo update

The message you receive in return (technically, the “output”) will either: (1) tell you that there is no updates available; or (2) update you to the latest version.

wo stack upgrade –all

This next command updates all the software that has been installed by WordOps on your server. This is things like Nginx (which you might remember is your web page serving software) and MariaDB, which is your database software, along with everything else. Run the following command:

wo stack upgrade --all

wo maintenance

This is the last command you’ll want to run. Basically, it updates all the other “non-WordOps” related software on your server.

wo maintenance

That’s it! Pretty harmless right? To make things even easier, just set a weekly reminder in Google Calendar or whatever other software you want, so you don’t forget to complete these steps regularly.

Keeping your server software up to date is important for security, speed and performance, and compatibility reasons, so please ensure you do it.