Originally published at: http://www.sitepoint.com/definitive-guide-to-wordpress-maintenance/
WordPress website maintenance is a fact of life. Without a little extra care, websites can become slow, error prone and unreliable and from a security perspective, a liability. Unwanted content such as comment spam can cause you a world of hurt, consuming valuable resources and impacting on your search rankings. Security flaws can enable attackers to use your site to commit fraud, spread malware and launch further attacks.
Regular maintenance is essential for a stable, healthy website.
For most of this article, we’re assuming you have Administrator access to your WordPress site, at the very least. It’s not uncommon for some WordPress users to not have access to their own hosting environment, whether that be cPanel, Plesk or shell access. You will just need access to your WordPress dashboard to install plugins. If you’re not a plugin kind of person, I understand, so I do mention other ways of achieving the same results by modifying your wp-config.php file. However, to do that you will need server level access.
and something that wp community is struggling with - maintaining stage and productions wp sites. So far I know there is no definitive solution. We have have to overwrite sites all the time with changes on stage or production and no chance to override only changes/