Like any software or mechanical products, websites require maintenance to keep working properly. Avoiding website maintenance is like not having regular oil changes on your vehicle or never updating your laptop. You wouldn’t drive your car very long if you didn’t look after its maintenance, would you? You would expect your laptop to give you the blue screen of death if you never updated it for years or scanned it for viruses, correct? Well, the same process is true for your website. Your website should always be live, ready for customers and presenting your business at its finest. Remember how important first impressions are to potential customers.
Websites Are Not Meant to be “Set and Forget”
If you don’t have website maintenance carried out monthly, you may be throwing money out the window. Many people don’t realize all the items required to check monthly on your website, like plug-in updates, security updates, corrections to themes when bugs arise, etc. When visitors go to a website and find things wrong with it, they often don’t stick around. Many website owners never check their website to see how it’s functioning. Missed website issues or downtime can lose potential customers – again, remember that first impression.
The Benefits of Monthly Maintenance
Many people don’t realize the benefits of site maintenance:
The website performance, load time, downtime and uptime depend on the WordPress software and plugin functioning as they should (and on the recent version).
The website’s growth, fresh content, analytics monitoring and design changes are all dependent on you having someone make sure all updates to the website are done in a smooth and error-free fashion. All of this behind-the-scenes work can happen without a worry for you.
How We Manage A Maintenance Workflow
At BG Digital Group, we take great care to back up the website and check it for any issues after our updates. Our software keeps a record of the plugins we update, so if there is an issue, we see what plugin version was changed and revert back. 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’s a problem.
Dangers of Do It Yourself Maintenance
Maintaining your site yourself could cost you more than you may think. If you just update from your WordPress admin, you wouldn’t have a record of what was done. If an update to a plugin created an issue a couple of weeks later, it would be difficult to know what changed and how you should revert without restoring a very old backup (and possibly losing content changes, sales orders, contact entries, you name it).
It Costs More to Fix Than to Maintain
Inexperience and neglect can damage the look and functionality of your website. When that happens, you have a choice to make. One, you try to fix it yourself, in which case you may cause further damage. Or two, you can then pay the (sometimes hefty) price for someone experienced to fix it. Just like your car, it costs more to fix it than it does to maintain it properly. Regular oil changes help keep your car running properly, regular site maintenance helps keep your website running properly.
Call in a Professional
Why not deal with what you know best 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 own website if you’re not a web professional? By securing an experienced web professional to update and maintain your site properly, you are saving potential lost sales and visitors. In the past, our team did all of this as part of our regular hosting agreements, but as the security threats rose and the number of websites rose with plug-ins requiring care, we had to change our way of managing website care for our hosting clients. We needed to add features and team members, which became cost-prohibited for us in doing things our prior way of website hosting.
If you’re interested in securing a maintenance care plan for your website, contact us to learn how we can keep your site in proper working order.