Website maintenance and the perils of not having it

Why Regular Website Maintenance is Key to a Successful Website

Just like any software you have, websites require regular maintenance to keep the site running well. Neglecting website maintenance is like not having regular oil changes on your car. How long would you drive your car if you didn’t look after it? Well, it is the same process for your website. Your website should always be live, ready for customers and presenting your business at its finest. And to do that, it needs regular upkeep.

No Website is a “Set and Forget”

If you don’t have any website maintenance carried out regularly, you will find that you’re actually throwing money out the window. When visitors go to a website and find things wrong with it or not working, they will not stick around for long. Too many website owners neglect to check their websites to see how it’s functioning. Missed website issues and downtime can lose you potential customers.

The Benefits of Maintenance

Many people don’t realise the benefits of site maintenance:

• Website performance, load time, downtime and uptime all rely on the WordPress software and plugins working as they should (and kept to the recent version).
• The website growth, content, analytics monitoring and design changes is all in need of you having someone making sure that all updates to the website are done regularly and securely.

Enhanced Security

According to a report from Forbes Magazine, more than 30,000 websites are hacked daily! (the article is from 2013, so the number is likely much higher!) Unfortunately, most business owners tend to believe it will never happen to them. Their business is not important or high-profile enough to attract the attention of hackers. Wrong!

Many websites are hacked with the simple goal of using it to send spam emails (millions of them). This is extremely detrimental to your domain ranking, and you risk being blacklisted by the many email providers very quickly. This will cause most, if not all, of your emails to end up in your recipient’s spam folder, guaranteed! Many times small business websites and blogs are targeted simply because they are small and, along these lines, less likely to be secure.

The average hacker doesn’t care about their actions’ impact on you and your business. If your site is not up to date with the latest cybersecurity programs, patches and fixes, you leave yourself wide open to attack.

Maintenance Workflow

At YUHANITO, we take great care to back up the website and then check the website for updates to see any issues. Our software keeps a record of the plugins we update, so if there is ever an issue, we see what plugin version was changed and revert. Also included in our monthly maintenance report are the performance and security scans. If we ever catch a plugin issue, it becomes a support ticket, and we address it before you know there is a problem.

The risks of DIY Maintenance

Maintaining your website yourself could cost you more than you may think. If you update the website from your WordPress admin, you wouldn’t know what was done and the potential domino effect it could cause. If an update to a plugin you did a couple of weeks ago created a contention issue with another update you did just now, it would be hard to realize what was changed and how you could revert without restoring a very old backup (if you have one!) and possibly losing content changes, sales orders, contact entries, you name it.

It Costs More to Fix Than to Maintain

Inexperience and carelessness can alter the look and feel of your website as well as its functionality. When that happens, you have a choice to make. One, you try and fix it yourself, in which case you may do further damage. Or two, you can then pay the (sometimes hefty) price for someone qualified to fix it. Just like your car, it costs more to fix than maintain properly. Regular oil changes help keep your car running properly, and regular site maintenance helps keeps your website running properly.

Call in a Specialist

Why not deal with what you know best, which is your business, and let us deal with what we know best? Would you try to fight that court battle without a lawyer? Then why try to maintain your website if you’re not a web professional? You are saving potential lost sales and visitors by securing a qualified web professional to update and maintain your site properly.

If you’re interested in securing a maintenance contract for your website for your peace of mind, please look at one of our WordPress Care Plans that we have in place. We’d be happy to set this up for you, or contact us to learn how we can protect and keep your site in good working order.