Why Is WordPress Maintenance Important?
Why is WordPress maintenance important for your website? We will go through what a maintenance plan is and why it is vital for your business and peace of mind.
In the past, you have spent a lot of time and effort on your new website, and you are happy with the result. However, most website owners from this point onwards concentrate on the business.
The website gets sidelined and even forgotten about.
This means that it is highly likely that your website may remain unchanged for months or even years before you get around to making any changes.
Depending on your site you may not have a blog or require regular changes to your services or pricing.
So you may think – why do I need maintenance?
Why Does WordPress Need Maintenance?
WordPress is an ultra-convenient content management system. In simple terms – it allows the user to manage content on one’s website, with no need for coding knowledge.
This ranges from simple blog sites full of stories and images to artist portfolios to sophisticated online shops.
With the use of plugins, one can adapt many functionalities into one’s website to better suit the needs of the user and enhance the end-user experience. Think of them as tools used for specific tasks to produce particular results.
A very important practice is to keep one’s WordPress up to date. With each update, the version is better equipped to function with the ever-evolving requirements and changes on the internet.
This ultimately raises the experience quality of end-users.
What Is WordPress Maintenance?
WordPress is continually improving its security and adding new features.
One of the greatest ways to stay secure and get the most out of your WordPress website is to keep it up to date. WordPress updates are a necessary aspect of running your website efficiently.
WordPress sites aren’t self-maintaining. There are frequent update rollouts and ever-present, ever-evolving threats to your site’s security.
Investing in a maintenance strategy assures that all your hard work wasn’t for naught.
When software upgrades, things don’t always go as planned. Things do break from time to time.
Your entire website may even go down at times.
Being prepared and having a plan of action are critical in these situations.
Why Is WordPress Maintenance Important – 6 Reasons
Core WordPress Software Update
As referenced before, new updates of WordPress introduce new features and improvements to existing ones.
Innovations and advancements to performance, admin features, and end-user experience are always within updates. Prevalent bugs will also have been fixed from the previous rollout.
With a continuously growing CMS, updates work to better everything. Better integration with third-party apps and better visuals and management tools.
Theme Update
Themes are the overall graphical elements that construct the visual appearance of the website. This will include graphics, styles, fonts, and code.
Updated themes have upgraded some features and have been tested with the latest WordPress release. This means it will be compatible and cause no integration issues.
Also due to the different image ratios on devices, themes need to adapt to new device display specs. So every device will display the website correctly.
Plugin Management
Plugins are integral to the functioning of your website.
These are mostly third-party, which sometimes leads to complications with plugin compatibility. This is due to various issues, some being updates or errors.
One must make sure that each is working and not hindering another from functioning. In other instances, new plugins come into the market, that do a better job and is more efficient.
Security
Possibly the most important, especially for sites that have sensitive user information.
Due to the growing popularity of WordPress, hackers have become more adept in their hacking endeavors. Especially towards WordPress sites.
With each update, there are new developments to prevent any exploits that have been uncovered.
One should also update plugins as old versions are a doorway to security breaches.
Back-Up Your Website
You will definitely need a backup of your site – the most recent version.
In case of failure of the site or worst-case scenario, a malware attack could wipe out your website. With a backup, you can easily restore the site to how it was with one click.
A recurring automatic backup system can be implemented. But these should be regularly checked to ensure the backups themselves are viable and can be used in emergencies.
User Experience
One factor that leads to users coming back to your site is the user experience. If the user experience degrades, that will affect the number of recurring visitors.
With changes, one can enhance the experience and make it better. The site needs consistent checking, maintenance, and use to ensure the best possible user experience.
Not Maintaining Your Website Could Cost More In The Long Run
One of the first things that show a lack of maintenance is a lag in speed when loading one’s site.
How important is website speed?
Speed is especially important for both user experience and good search engine optimisation practices.
Lack of speed can be attributed to many things but with no maintenance, one would not know what the core issue would be.
In such cases, you would have to find a professional to comb through your site. Unfortunately, with no prior knowledge of the website, they would need more time.
With that extra downtime, you could lose end users.
Maintenance will always result in an expedient recovery to whatever issue has arisen.
Hire A Professional
Competent professionals will fix any issue, from the tiniest to the biggest. They have perfected action plans for maintenance, recovery, building a site, and other procedures.
These action plans keep one’s site online and working efficiently.
Preventative measures can be implemented to avoid security breaches and other issues that can arise. Having a strong pre-emptive plan can curb a lot of issues.
This can be drafted by a professional who has an acute proficiency in WordPress and of the internet.
Reasons to Hire a Professional
Professionals have, over time, gained experience and knowledge from every job done. For most issues that arise, professionals have either a fix or have knowledge of the issue.
They also have a vast network of other professionals to contact for advice.
They Will Find Errors
The trickiest problem with website errors is actually finding where the error is. The tiniest faults can cause the biggest problems on a site.
Hence an in-depth understanding of the smaller parts within the website structure is required.
They Will Fix Breaks When Things Go Wrong Quickly
With their vast knowledge and experiences, professionals have encountered many errors.
They will have perfected their methods of fixing the problem in a timeous manner.
Maintain A Regular Update Schedule
Regular maintenance is imperative to keep your website working efficiently. An update schedule for WordPress, plugins, backups and other peripherals will make sure you are secure.
Maintenance will save you more time than you might think.
“Time is money” is the saying. And for the internet, anytime your site is down, it is very bad for business and can affect your brand and sales dramatically.
Conclusion
Any WordPress website that wants to be successful should have a good maintenance plan in place.
This should ideally be performed regularly by specialists. This ensures that the site will continue to work properly.
With effective maintenance, the site’s themes and plugins are updated as needed. This means that the site continues to appear and perform well.
The site’s owner can then focus on the content rather than worrying about the site breaking.
Any website must be properly handled and professionally maintained to perform smoothly.
It is impossible to expect any site to rank highly in search engine results or to run smoothly for an extended period without a solid maintenance plan.
Site Dynamix offers a professional website maintenance package. All you need to do is contact us asking for a quote.
