Reasons why you need a WordPress Maintenance Plan for your website
Despite its simplicity and ease of use, under the hood WordPress is a fairly sophisticated database-driven system with lots of underlying source code. Having a WordPress Maintenance Plan will ensure that your website remains stable, secure, and is operating at its best!
Viruses, Hackers, and Bots, Oh My!
Due to being a highly ubiquitous platform (think Microsoft Windows for websites), WordPress is a common target for hackers, viruses, bots, and other bad actors in cyberspace. In fact, ZDNet has reported that WordPress accounted for roughly 90 percent of all hacked content management systems sites in 2018.
Imagine one day learning that your site contains malware and is unsafe. Or maybe portions of your website disappear entirely. Or perhaps worse, hackers take control of your site, steal your customer’s information, and deface your site, severely damaging your company’s brand and reputation.
Fortunately, the majority of these security concerns can be addressed by simply keeping your website up to date with a WordPress Maintenance Plan.
Keeping Your Website Current is the First Line of Defense
WordPress routinely receives new updates, typically multiple new release updates each month, which improve the security and performance of the platform. In order to make sure that your WordPress website remains secure, your site needs consistent maintenance of the core code as well as any plugins that may be in use.
In the aforementioned ZDNet report, “experts blamed most of the hacks on vulnerabilities in plugins and themes, misconfiguration issues, and a lack of maintenance by webmasters, who often forgot to update their content management system, themes, and plugins.”
By routinely updating your WordPress website and all plugins, you are ensuring that your site has the latest security patches in place, significantly reducing your vulnerability to common attacks. Ignore these updates at your own peril.
A Properly Maintained Website = Good User Experience
Aside from security considerations, also consider that most WordPress sites utilize plugins that are produced and maintained by third party vendors. Depending on how vigilant the plugin developer is with their updates, compatibility issues can arise with each new WordPress update, which is all the more reason you need to keep both the WordPress core version current along with any plugins, and you need to perform quality assurance testing with each update to ensure that nothing breaks and that performance does not suffer in a way that will impact users.
As a site owner, you want to offer a positive user experience for your visitors. Poorly maintained sites with broken links, errors and warnings, or slow loading times, will push the patience of visitors who are likely accustomed to fast Internet service. Customers will be less trusting of your website and less likely to interact with your business if your site appears unprofessional or unsafe, either of which can be the undesirable byproduct of a poorly maintained site. A WordPress Maintenance Plan is the most fundamental step you can take to ensure that visitors to your site leave with a positive impression of your organization.
A Hosting Plan is Not (Necessarily) a WordPress Maintenance Plan
Every WordPress website needs hosting, and hosting plans come in all shapes and sizes – from low budget shared hosting, to fully-managed dedicated servers and high-powered VPS/cloud plans. Typically, these plans come with some level of maintenance and administration from the host (unless you are responsible for complete administration of your own server); this may include routine software patches, and upgrades, or firewall monitoring. However, what’s important to understand is that the “maintenance” of the server/hosting environment is a separate set of tasks from the maintenance of your WordPress website.
Generally speaking, the host does NOT perform WordPress specific maintenance to keep your website current; things like WP core version updates, plugin and theme updates, customizations, troubleshooting, and quality assurance testing need to performed separately. There are some specialized plans that bundle hosting and maintenance together such as those that we offer at Queerly Creative, but those plans are rarely bundled like ours. In short, it’s important to ensure that you have a solid plan for both your server administration AND your WordPress maintenance.
Factors Outside of WordPress
Speaking of hosting, it’s important to acknowledge that the standards for the underlying technologies upon which WordPress operates (such as PHP and MySQL) are also subject to changes; this is another reason that you want to update the version of WordPress on your site. For example, if you are running WordPress using an old version of PHP or MySQL, or if they have not received the proper security patches, then your hosting environment may become incompatible with WordPress and your site may stop running. Or worse, it could continue to run but with a host of back-door security vulnerabilities that you may not even be aware of.
Customizations, and Hard to Reach Places
WordPress websites can vary greatly, not only in terms of appearance, but in terms of setup and configuration. Very few professionally developed WordPress websites go live with a generic “out of the box” setup. Rather, most WordPress websites are a combination of third-party plugins, themes, and various configurations thereof. Each WordPress website is typically further customized to meet the unique needs of each organization.
While WordPress makes it very easy for general users to update basic content, such as blog posts, events, press releases, or other page content, the time will inevitably come where you’ll need the assistance of a WordPress developer. Eventually you will want to (or need to) change something that is a little more behind the scenes, such as modifying input fields on a page, or a contact form, or a customization to a theme or page template; basically anything that involves touching or creating source code.
In these cases, you will want to make sure that you have a reliable developer like Queerly Creative to make these adjustments for you. This is where our WordPress Maintenance Plans can make your life easier and help advance your web presence!
Waiting for a Website Emergency is Not a Plan
Preventative WordPress maintenance is your best defense to prevent any unfortunate surprises with your website and to keep it running smoothly. But even despite best efforts, unanticipated issues such as bugs, errors, and outages can arise, and when that happens you’ll want to have a reliable, dedicated agency that is ready to act on your behalf and get things up and running as quickly as possible.
You do not want to find yourself in the position of waiting, or having to hunt down a new consultant or agency to help you as your website visitors encounter problems and your reputation suffers. Leaving things to chance without a plan is certainly an option, but it is not a wise one. Making sure that you have a proper support resource in place ahead of time is the only responsible choice for any decision-maker who wants to reliably protect their brand and business.
The Perfect Solution for Your WordPress Maintenance
At Queerly Creative, our developers are experts at WordPress maintenance, website customization, analytics, and growth strategy. Site maintenance is an important & necessary part of making sure your website functions optimally, and we have the perfect solution for both your hosting, AND maintenance needs! Our Website Hosting & Maintenance Plans offer all of the basic support you need, and much more! Let us manage all of your website maintenance, and provide you with expert advice, analytics reports, and monthly Strategy calls to discuss website growth & optimization.
