Website Maintenance Is Key to a Successful Website
Just like any software, websites require maintenance to keeping them working properly. Avoiding website maintenance is like not having regular oil changes on your vehicle or annual teeth cleanings. You wouldn’t drive your car very long if you didn’t look after its maintenance, would you? And you wouldn’t have your teeth if you neglect them. 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. It is a living, changing entity.
“Set It and Forget It”
That might have worked for Ron Popeil and Ronco, but it won’t work with a living, changing website. If you don’t have website maintenance carried out monthly, you may actually be throwing money out the window. 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 you potential customers. And if your WordPress site has ever been hacked, you know the time and cost involved in fixing that fiasco.
The Benefits of Regular Site Maintenance
Many people don’t realize the benefits of site maintenance (until they’ve been hacked) — just like many people don’t believe in burglar alarms until they’ve been robbed.
Your site’s performance, its load time, downtime and uptime, is all dependent on the WordPress software and plugin functioning as they should (and on the most current version). Your website’s growth, its fresh content, analytics monitoring, and design changes, are all dependent on someone making sure all updates to the website are done in a timely and smooth manner.
At Pixelita Designs, we believe it makes business sense to perform preventive maintenance rather than putting out the fire after a neglected site is hacked. If in the event we ever catch a plugin issue, it becomes a support ticket and we address it before you ever 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 updated or changed. If an update to a plugin created an issue a couple weeks later, it would be difficult to know what changed and how you should revert back 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 and fix it yourself, in which case you may do 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 keeps your web site running properly.
Call in a Professional
If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional, wait until you get an amateur to do it.
~~ Paul H. (Red) Adair
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? Take out your own spleen? Then why try to maintain your own website if you’re not a web professional? By hiring an experienced web professional to update and maintain your site properly you are actually saving potential lost sales and visitors and buying yourself peace of mind.
If you’re interested in a WP Care Plan, contact us to learn how we can keep your site in proper working order.
Joni Mueller has been designing web sites for hire since 2003, when she first blew up her web host’s server by insisting on running Greymatter. Since then, Joni has designed for Blogger and Movable Type, TextPattern, WordPress and CMS Made Simple. She lives with her cat and shoe collection in a bucolic old section of Houston called Idylwood. For some strange reason, Joni likes to refer to herself in the third person. When she’s not working on web design, she’s ordering lawyers around. And blogging about it. Or both.
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