WordPress Maintenance: the Key to a Successful Website
Your website is a living, breathing thing, so-to-speak. It’s never truly done and needs to be looked after, just like a garden. If you stop watering your plants, they start to look sad and wilt. The same is true for your website; it needs to be updated, technically, visually and with content, as well as checked for bugs and hackers so that it will be there for your new and returning customers when you cannot. For these reasons, this is why website maintenance is so important.
You Can’t Just “Set and Forget” a Website
Your website should be maintained on a monthly basis. If you aren’t checking in on it, you could miss potential issues, experience downtime, or even get hacked with no backup plan. If a visitor comes to your site and experiences anything wrong, they’ll be hitting the back button and searching elsewhere.
The Benefits of Monthly Website Maintenance
Many people don’t realize what the benefits of maintenance are:
- The performance and load time of your website, and its ability to stay online, all depend on WordPress and its plugins running smoothly — and on the most recent version. WordPress and plugins are frequently updated to fix bugs and add features, among other things.
- The growth of your website, gaining new traffic, maintaining your search engine ranking, and keeping your site updated all need to be done in an error-free fashion.
The Maintenance Workflow
At Smack Happy Design, we offer WordPress support and care plans to backup your website and check the updates we make. We keep a record of the plugins that get updated and the version numbers. So if there’s ever an issue, we can quickly and easily revert your site back to the previous state. Then, we address the issue and update it properly. All without you ever knowing there was a problem.
The Dangers of “Do It Yourself” Maintenance
The problem with making WordPress and plugin updates yourself is that you won’t have a record of what has changed. If you make the updates and several weeks later you start having a problem, you won’t be able to pinpoint the source. This may end up costing more money when you hire someone to troubleshoot and get you back on track.
It Costs More to Fix Than to Maintain
When things break due to inexperience and neglect, you may end up in a state where you can’t even make edits to your website. You could experience downtime and possibly lose potential customers. You can then hire someone experienced to come in and fix everything, but that could get pricey in an emergency and who knows if they’ll be available right away. Being proactive, preventative, and maintaining your site with a professional is much cheaper in the long run. And it will give you piece of mind.
Call in a Professional
In a perfect world, you would work on what you love and know best, and we would deal with what we know best – taking care of your website. Would you try to fix a broken arm without a doctor? Then why maintain your website without a web specialist? By hiring us to maintain and update your website properly you are potentially saving lost sales and visitors. If you’re ready to take the next step, contact us to figure out the right website maintenance plan for you, and ensure that your website is healthy and running smoothly.
