Monthly Maintenance

This document describes the maintenance tasks recommended on a monthly cycle for a production site running the ADP Car Market Hub plugin. These tasks focus on configuration health, data retention, security hygiene, and staging readiness.

When to use this document

Read this document if you are a site administrator or technical owner responsible for the long-term stability of an installation. Monthly maintenance complements the daily and weekly checks and addresses areas that do not require frequent attention but can become problems if left unreviewed for extended periods.

Overview

Monthly tasks cover areas such as: reviewing data retention settings, auditing plugin configuration, verifying that staging environments reflect the current production state, confirming that the WordPress installation and plugin remain up to date and supported, and reviewing any diagnostics exports for support readiness.

Requirements

• Administrator account with the manage_as24_imports capability.
• Access to the production WordPress admin and, ideally, to a staging environment.
• Access to hosting or server controls if server-cron mode is in use.

Monthly tasks

1. Review analytics data retention

1. Open ADP Car Market Hub → Analytics.
2. Confirm that the Analytics retention period is set to a value appropriate for your privacy obligations and storage requirements. The default is 180 days.
3. Old analytics records are deleted automatically by a daily WP-Cron job. Verify that the cleanup cron hook (as24ci_daily_cleanup) is running by checking the System & Help tab for any cron warnings.
4. If analytics is enabled but you are subject to GDPR, DSGVO, revDSG, or a similar privacy regulation, confirm that the consent configuration and data minimization settings are correctly configured under the Analytics tab.

2. Audit plugin settings

1. Open ADP Car Market Hub → Settings and review the core configuration: Seller IDs, API credentials, default currency, default post status, default post author, and image import settings.
2. Confirm that all Seller IDs configured are still active and relevant. Remove any that are no longer in use.
3. Review the Max images per vehicle setting. If vehicle pages are loading slowly, reducing the number of imported images can improve performance.
4. If WebP conversion is enabled, confirm that the server's PHP installation supports the GD or Imagick extension with WebP output.

3. Review automation and cron configuration

1. Open ADP Car Market Hub → Import & Limits and review the import schedule, maximum vehicles per run, full sync setting, and image queue mode.
2. Confirm that the import frequency matches your AutoScout24 listing update cadence. Running imports more frequently than your listings change adds unnecessary server load.
3. If you are using server cron mode, log in to your hosting control panel or server and verify that the cron job is still active and pointing to the correct URL or REST endpoint.
4. If you are using WP-Cron, confirm that no caching or full-page cache layer is interfering with WP-Cron execution.

4. Check system requirements in the System & Help tab

1. Open ADP Car Market Hub → System & Help.
2. Review the PHP memory limit, maximum execution time, and any other environment checks displayed in the System & Help tab.
3. The System & Help tab indicates status with color-coded badges. Resolve any items flagged as bad (red). Items flagged as warn (amber) are acceptable but may cause issues under load.
4. PHP memory of 256 MB or more is recommended for large catalogue imports. Execution time of more than 60 seconds is recommended. Verify these values in your hosting environment if the badges indicate a problem.

5. Run a diagnostics export for support readiness

1. Open ADP Car Market Hub → System & Help and locate the Export diagnostics button (if available in the current plugin version).
2. Download the diagnostics export and store it alongside your backup records. This file contains system information needed if you contact support, without including credentials or private data.
3. Verify that the export renders cleanly and does not contain unexpected errors.

6. Review and refresh the staging environment

1. If your organisation maintains a staging site, take a fresh database and files backup from production this month and restore it to staging.
2. Apply the latest plugin update to staging first (see Update Process).
3. Run a manual import on staging to confirm that the import pipeline, image downloads, lead form, and analytics tracking all work as expected.
4. Confirm that staging is not indexed by search engines and is not sending lead notification emails to real customers. Block staging with a maintenance plugin, HTTP authentication, or robots.txt, and redirect lead emails to a test address.

7. Review log archive files

1. Connect to the server via SFTP or your hosting file manager and navigate to the WordPress uploads directory, then to the as24ci-logs/ subdirectory.
2. The plugin automatically rotates the main log file when it exceeds 10 MB and deletes archived log files after 7 days. Confirm that the directory is not accumulating unexpected files.
3. If log rotation is not occurring as expected, verify that the uploads directory is writable by the web server process.
4. Download and archive any log files you need to retain for longer than 7 days before they are automatically purged.

8. Confirm WordPress core and plugin updates

1. Open WordPress Admin → Dashboard → Updates.
2. Apply any available WordPress core security updates.
3. Review the plugin changelog (see Release Notes) before applying plugin updates. Follow the Update Process document.
4. Keep PHP at a version that is actively supported and meets the plugin's minimum requirement of PHP 8.1.

Operational notes

• The plugin stores all configuration in the WordPress options table (wp_options). Plugin-managed custom tables are {prefix}as24_vehicles (vehicle field data), {prefix}as24ci_analytics (analytics events), {prefix}as24ci_search_agents (search-alert subscriptions) and the two Content Studio tables {prefix}as24ci_content_studio_jobs and {prefix}as24ci_content_studio_assets (AI content-generation jobs and generated marketing assets). All of these tables are created and upgraded automatically by the plugin.
• The analytics table is always dropped on plugin uninstall, regardless of the "delete data on uninstall" setting, because it holds visitor tracking data.
• The vehicles table and all imported vehicle posts are only deleted on uninstall if the Delete data on uninstall option is enabled in Settings.
• On WordPress multisite installations, the plugin manages options and custom tables per site. Each site in the network has its own configuration, import data, and analytics table.

Troubleshooting

Related documents

• Daily Operation
• Weekly Maintenance
• Backup and Restore
• Update Process
• Logging and Monitoring