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A new client request came in for annual maintenance on a WordPress website. No problem, we’ve been providing WordPress maintenance for years. Oh, did I mention that the website had been virtually untouched for about 10 years? This is going to be interesting…

We performed a quick audit and determined the website was running WordPress 4.9.26. For reference, the latest WordPress version as of writing is 6.7.2. The website was also using PHP 7.4 which had been discontinued in late 2022. Further digging revealed that the server was set to use PHP 5.4 by default. Yikes.

Because the WordPress version was very old we decided to first test the auto-update process on a development server. And wouldn’t you know it, the auto-update failed. As a point of interest, the auto-update would also later fail on the live website leading us to believe WordPress had changed something under the hood. No worries, we know how to update WordPress manually so this was a minor inconvenience. It did help me realize that manually updating WordPress is a good way to flush out files that are no longer being used. Having maintained some WordPress websites for over 10 years I’ve noticed the auto-update does not delete files that the WordPress team has deprecated (probably erring on the side of caution) so these files tend to accumulate.

We cleaned up the Themes and Plugins but thankfully there weren’t many of either. We deleted the unused ones including 2 plugins that were not going to be helpful moving forward (one was even displaying errors in the Dashboard).

We added some security protection including refreshing the WordPress salts and changing all user passwords. As added precautions we ran a few malware scans and manually combed through the uploads directory to make sure nothing suspicious had been left there.

Finally, we updated to PHP 8 and made sure the website was still functioning. What surprised me the most was how much more responsive the website became. I know PHP 8 brought about some speed enhancements but I suspect the WordPress team worked some magic to further optimize the code.