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Although SQL Server seems to become better at managing statistics as the years go by, we highly recommend setting up agent jobs to update statistics at least on a weekly basis, if not more often. This is to make sure that the SQL server engine has the most up to date information about the data when it is going to generate execution plans for your queries, thereby reducing the risk of getting horrible execution plans and bad performance on your site.
Whether or not you should defragment indexes is debated, but take note that indexes on large tables can grow over time, and if the tables are cleared regularly, indexes can contain chunks of white space that could be optimized by defragmenting the index. This can both lead to less disk space being used by the index, and increased performance due to reduced logical reads since the page order in the index is tidied up. In our SaaS environments we use Ola Hallengren’s scripts for Index and Statistics maintenance and we highly recommend those to our clients. The scripts can be found here:
https://ola.hallengren.com/sql-server-index-and-statistics-maintenance.html
Important:
If you run a Standard edition of SQL server, you should make sure that you remove any “REBUILD” options from the index maintenance parameters. Only leave “REORGANIZE”. ONLINE REBUILD is not a Standard edition feature, so you could risk taking tables offline temporarily if the maintenance job decides to start an index rebuild on a heavily fragmented index.