You Need A WordPress Maintenance Plan!
WordPress websites are not “set and forget” websites.
It’s a known fact that a website is an absolute must for your business to succeed in today’s world.
If you can’t be found online, it’s all over.
One of the unexpected burdens of having a website is the time or money required to maintain it. Every website has a bare minimum amount of website management required.
If your website is dynamic and uses scripts, or is built with a CMS like WordPress, then routine updates will be necessary to ensure your website stays secure and loading quickly.
WordPress powers over 35% of websites on the Internet, and is the most popular website building tool for small businesses.
In the last year, cyber-attacks have spiked nearly 40%, and small businesses are easy targets for malware, ransomware, and other cyber-attacks.
Managing your plugins, theme, and WordPress files routinely is an absolute must.
Using two-factor authentication for your website is highly encouraged by Wordfence as they have found that;
Over the course of 2020, Wordfence blocked more than 90 billion malicious login attempts from over 57 million unique IP addresses, at a rate of 2,800 attacks per second targeting WordPress.
Wordfence 2020 WordPress Threat Report
This type of routine website maintenance can prevent serious problems, like downtime, data breaches, or being blacklisted from search engines.
Keeping your website up to date isn’t an option – someone has to do it.
If planning out your website maintenance routine sounds like too much work, there are services to handle it for you. A WordPress maintenance plan will allow you to focus on running your business, knowing a professional is managing your website.
How can a WordPress maintenance plan improve my business revenue?
Knowing your website is online and being kept up to date lets you put more of your focus and energy into running your business. If you’re a business owner, you probably don’t want to add “website manager” to your collection of hats!
If you do, that’s great as WordPress maintenance isn’t necessarily difficult, just a necessary part of having a WordPress website.
If your WordPress website is being maintained by professionals, you’ll avoid almost every problem commonly associated with WordPress, such as security concerns, unresponsive or slow-loading websites, or unexpected downtime.
If your website maintenance plan includes adding new content to your website, like updating service pages or an e-commerce website store’s main sales page, your website management team’s work will likely be better than what you can do on your own and in less time than it would take you to do it.
A landing page created by a professional website designer will get you more sales than a page you make on your own. There’s a reason why they are professionals after all!
Maintaining WordPress Avoids Most Security Problems
A professional website maintenance provider will typically watch, and catch potential security threats before they become a big headache. This is just one of the many perks of having a maintenance plan for your website.
If your website gets hacked, you could face several problems ranging from simply having to hire someone to clean up malware, losing your website, and having to start over, or something far worse; like having customer data stolen.
Keeping your website maintained isn’t going to prevent all security attacks, but it’s one of many measures you should take to keep your website and your customer data safe.
It’s simple: a professionally managed WordPress website will load quicker, and faster websites generally make more sales.
It’s no secret that a fast website will convert better than a slower website. Most website maintenance plans will include monitoring site speed to catch any problems; if a website is fast and suddenly becomes slow, it could be a sign that something is wrong. Optimizing your website speed is something you should do once, and re-evaluate every few months to ensure you’re maintaining the same speed results.
How can a WordPress maintenance plan improve my productivity?
A WordPress maintenance plan can help you be more productive by cutting out the time you spend fumbling around or having to learn about WordPress.
If you’re running a Woocommerce website or just a blog, you probably didn’t plan the added maintenance tasks of running a WordPress website.
A professional WordPress designer has thousands of hours of experience working with WordPress. This means they are going to be faster than you at doing nearly anything including logging in, taking backups, running software updates, and other routine maintenance for your website.
What if I want to maintain WordPress myself?
Services commonly used for monitoring or managing your own WordPress websites on a budget include Uptime Robot, Pingdom Tools, MainWP, or ManageWP.
Uptime Robot is a great, free tool for monitoring your website’s responsiveness. You can receive push notifications, or install their app, to get notified if your website is offline. It can even monitor your SSL certificate and warn you if it’s expired.
Pingdom Tools offers a website uptime monitoring service that can also help you better understand how fast your website loads, what bottlenecks may exist, and other features based on website performance.
ManageWP is a GoDaddy-owned management tool that helps you manage multiple WordPress websites from a single dashboard. You can connect it to your websites and view data about site speed, security, uptime, and more.
MainWP is another website management tool, ideal for businesses or organizations that have multiple WordPress websites to manage. MainWP is a self-hosted solution that makes it easy to keep track of plugins, themes, and core updates across all of your WordPress websites.
Tips for picking a professional WordPress maintenance plan
There is no one WordPress maintenance plan to rule them all. When deciding on what type of maintenance plan to get for your website, there are a few key points to consider.
Website maintenance plans for business owners
Most business owners realize the importance of having a website but don’t have the expertise or the time to learn how to manage and maintain their websites. Businesses can typically find affordable maintenance plans for WordPress websites for as low as $30 and some plans go as high as $500/mo or more.
Naturally, the maintenance services will vary from plan to plan, and the cost is sometimes an indicator of the type of maintenance being performed.
At the very least, you should expect a good WordPress maintenance plan to include monitoring services that scan for security threats, performance issues, server stability concerns, and search rankings. Almost all maintenance plans for WordPress websites will also include keeping your website’s software (WordPress themes, plugins, and core) up to date and backed up often.
The more expensive website maintenance plans typically include 24/7 support, website revisions/edits, and other management services.
Maintenance plans for DIY WordPress webmasters
If you picked WordPress because you’re someone who enjoys learning and doing on their own, and you don’t mind being involved in maintaining your WordPress website, you can likely forgo hiring a professional.
We recommend visiting the backend of your WordPress website at least once a week to check if any plugins, themes, or WordPress itself needs to be updated. Take a backup of your WordPress website, and perform your updates. If any issues arise, roll back your updates and go from.
Secure your WordPress website with Wordfence or another security plugin that scans your files for suspicious files. We still recommend signing up for website maintenance tools like Uptime Robot or Pingdom Tools for self-managed websites.
Neglecting your WordPress website is never the answer!
Whether you take on the tasks of WordPress maintenance yourself or enlist the services of a professional WordPress maintenance provider, there’s no arguing that your WordPress website has to be maintained!
