Most things need regular care and maintenance to ensure they continue to run effectively, and your website is no exception. When it comes to website maintenance, one of the strongest parallels is with car maintenance. A vehicle only runs smoothly with routine check-ups, even if it looks perfect on the outside. You stay on the safe side when the engine is checked, parts are updated, and small issues are fixed before they turn into larger, more expensive repairs.

Drupal websites perform at their best when the behind-the-scenes care stays consistent. Even the most polished, professional-looking site will have components that wear out, settings that shift, and security layers that weaken over time. With regular attention, your Drupal site can continue doing its work seamlessly and safely 24/7; loading content, processing forms, storing data, and, of course, representing your brand as intended.

That being said, it’s no surprise there’s plenty of content about site maintenance. So where do you start to understand the whys and hows? Here is a curated collection of our team’s latest insights on Drupal website maintenance, a simple cheat sheet with everything you might need to know. Although these articles focus primarily on Drupal, they might be useful to you regardless of your website’s platform.

Latest insights on website maintenance

Keep your Drupal site in top shape without costly mistakes

Even with the strongest launch, several factors might impact how your Drupal website performs over time. Richard Nosek, our team’s Digital Strategist, in collaboration with Greta Barbosa, our Digital Marketing Strategist, shares key areas to keep on top of regularly:

• User expectations evolve. What felt intuitive and streamlined on day one can gradually become overwhelming as new content, pages, and navigation items are added. A structure that once made sense can start slowing users down.
   
• Search engines shift their priorities. SEO best practices, ranking factors, and crawler behaviors continually change. Without ongoing optimization and monitoring, even well-built sites can lose visibility, authority, and organic traffic.
   
• Modules, themes, and browsers keep updating. Each update introduces new features and sometimes breaking changes. Compatibility issues, layout glitches, and unexpected bugs appear if these updates aren’t managed carefully.
   
• Security risks escalate. From new vulnerabilities in contrib modules to evolving attack patterns, threats multiply quickly. A single unpatched hole can expose sensitive data or take an entire site offline.
   
• New opportunities emerge. Marketing campaigns, integrations, new forms, program launches — all require rapid implementation. Without someone continuously maintaining and enhancing the platform, your team slows down or misses key moments.
   

Here is where website maintenance comes in, making sure your website keeps up with the change and stays in excellent shape. For maintenance, partnering with a dedicated Drupal maintenance team is better than a DIY or ad-hoc model. This is due to predictable support costs with no costly surprises, faster feature delivery, continuous security coverage with regular Drupal security updates and patches, performance tuning, and data-driven recommendations. Richard and Greta unveil more details in the article  “Why Your Drupal Website Needs Ongoing Maintenance: Avoiding Costly Mistakes.”

Fix or prevent 5 common Drupal website issues

Let’s take a closer look at the kinds of issues that most often disrupt the user experience on Drupal websites. They can quietly (or sometimes loudly) erode traffic, weaken your SEO visibility, reduce conversions, damage brand trust, or even create compliance risks.

While websites can run into many types of problems, five of them appear again and again — and they tend to have the biggest impact. Here are the most common ones:

• Slow loading times. Pages may take too long to display, which is often caused by unoptimized images, numerous modules, or missing front-end performance optimizations, and more.
   
• Broken links and pages. After clicking on menu items, buttons, or external links, users can land on a “Page Not Found” message. This can be caused by poor website management, but overall, broken links are almost inevitable with time.
   
• Broken functionality. One of the biggest causes of user frustration is when some features on a website just don’t work. This is often caused by conflicting modules, skipped updates, or other technical issues.
   
• Accessibility problems. It can be hard for people with disabilities to use a website effectively. This is due to missing Alt text, inadequate keyboard navigation, inaccessible forms, and other issues.
   
• Cluttered content pages. Dense paragraphs, inconsistent formatting, or scattered visuals may make it difficult for visitors to read, navigate, and understand the site’s information. This is often due to the absence of the proper content structure or strategy.

The best part is that Drupal has plenty of tools and best practices that help resolve these issues, and, which is even better, prevent them from appearing in the future. Find lots of practical, Drupal-specific insights in the article “5 Common Drupal Website Issues (and How Ongoing Maintenance Prevents Them).”

Discover important maintenance tasks that protect your site

The next article in our collection is a straightforward, useful guide to building a maintenance routine no matter your platform. Think of it as a rock-solid plan that works for any site because it revolves around protection, uptime, and smooth daily operations. The most essential website maintenance tasks listed in the article include:

• security audits and vulnerability scans to keep your site safe
• fast, consistent updates and patches across modules, plugins, third-party libraries, your CMS, and your web server
• monitoring and alerting tools that detect unusual activity, track uptime and response times, and analyze logs
• regular backups and recovery drills to ensure your data stays intact even when something unexpected happens
• security training for your team and clear policy documents that add an extra layer of protection to your website’s daily operations

Read the full post to discover more useful details on specific security platforms, tools, and techniques that help you implement each part of the plan. As a bonus, the article ends with daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual checklists for you to start shaping a maintenance rhythm that keeps your site resilient every day of the year.

Rely on analytics data to fine-tune your maintenance 

Numbers never lie when they are interpreted properly, that’s why analytics data rules the world of digital experiences. It’s a whole treasure box of useful information on how your website performs and how your visitors behave on it. For website maintenance, this means knowing exactly what needs attention and, once improvements are made, being able to measure their real impact. 

Good maintenance begins with uncovering these patterns. One of the most important steps is tracking the key performance metrics that reveal your site’s overall health. These include:

• Core Web Vitals (a set of three metrics from Google on loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability)
• bounce rate and session duration
• page load times by device and region
• traffic sources and conversion paths
• search performance

To monitor all of this effectively, there are a number of essential tools you can rely on: Google Analytics 4, Search Console, Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights, Hotjar or Crazy Egg, New Relic or Datadog, and others. Together, they help you track user journeys, analyze audience segments, spot bottlenecks, run real-time audits, visualize behavior through heatmaps and session recordings, and more.

In the article “Data-Driven Website Maintenance: Using Analytics to Guide Ongoing Improvements,” Digital Experience Solutions Director, Bjorn Thomson, brings these elements into one clear framework. He explains how to turn raw numbers into meaningful actions and how to repeat the cycle over time so your site gradually becomes faster, more stable, and more user-friendly. In addition to the overview of metrics and tools, you’ll find a step-by-step data-driven website maintenance process outline and a real-world example of turning data into gold.

Save your simple site maintenance checklist

We know you don’t always have the time for long-reads, so we’ve prepared a hands-on Drupal site maintenance checklist for your use. It lists website maintenance tasks that need to be done with regular frequency.

The list includes updating Drupal modules and core, applying security patches, performance audits, UX and content reviews, SEO health checks, backup and recovery tests, uptime and error monitoring, and more.

Final thoughts

The best Drupal website maintenance checklist could consist of just one thing: contact a reliable Drupal team. Regular check-ins, thoughtful improvements, and a steady hand keeping everything in sync make a noticeable difference over time. Maintenance, when done with expertise and attention, can give you confidence that your Drupal website will keep performing, evolving, and supporting your goals every day.