Avoiding website maintenance is like not having regular oil changes on your vehicle. You wouldn’t drive your car very long if you didn’t look after its maintenance, would you? 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. For a successful web presence, your website should at all times present your brand at its finest.
That means, at the very least, it should always be easily accessible to your site visitors. Having a reliable website-care team is an important part of making sure you are always open for business online.
Websites Are Not a “Set and Forget”
Your website should be maintained on a monthly basis. If you aren’t checking in on it, you could miss potential issues, experience downtime, or even get hacked with no backup plan.
If a visitor comes to your site and experiences anything wrong, they’ll be hitting the back button and searching elsewhere. 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.
Websites Don’t Run on Autopilot
As with any operating system or software program, a website needs regular maintenance to keep it working properly. Years ago, when I was enrolled in preliminary flight training, the first thing I learned was that checklists were my best friends. I needed to make sure that the airplane I was about to fly had fuel, was in top shape, and that any issues found during website maintenance had been repaired and tested.
The Benefits of Maintenance
Many people don’t realize the benefits of site maintenance: The website performance, it’s load time, downtime and uptime and downtime, and user-friendly interface are all critical is all dependent on the WordPress software and plugin functioning as they should (and on the recent version).
The website growth, it’s fresh content, analytics monitoring and design changes are all dependent on you having someone making sure all updates to the website are done in a smooth and error-free fashion. All of these factors are largely dependent on how well and how often your site is being monitored, that backups are available in case a problem arises, and that updates are run in a smooth and error-free fashion.
Having website usage reports can also inform you about what is and isn’t working with your online approach, as well as show you how visitors are finding and interacting with your website. Where are you successfully converting site visitors into business leads, purchasing customers, or organizational supporters? And where are you losing them?
All of this data provides information on how to manage and improve your website over time to help you meet your goals.
Maintenance Workflow
Our software keeps a record of plugins we update so if there is ever 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 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 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 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
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 actually saving potential lost sales and visitors. If you’re interested in securing a website care plan for your web site, contact us to learn how we can keep your site in proper working order.
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About Author
Mr.Vivek Chaturvedi
Vivek Chaturvedi is the co-founder and CTO at Vidhema Technologies. He is responsible for the overall technical operations of the company and has played a major role in bringing Vidhema up from its humble beginnings and, with his immense energy and drive, transforming it into a globally trusted name in IT solutions.