Why is Maintenance important for WordPress Sites?

Are you the type of person who maintains their car by keeping the petrol tank full, checking the oil, getting it serviced and so on?  We do too!  It is no secret that when we look after our possessions, they service our needs better.  And websites are no exception to this rule.

Which is why paying for website maintenance is money well spent.  It ensures that your wonderful website retains its good looks and healthy nature so it can continues to show off your business to best advantage and attract new customers.  Here are just some of the benefits to professional web maintenance for your WordPress site:

Keeps you up to speed with software updates

WordPress regularly issues updates to fix bugs and security issues and new features and enhancements to stay up-to-date with industry standards.

Paying for regular maintenance ensures that these are applied in a way that works with the WordPress theme you’ve chosen for your website.  For example, your web developer may have incorporated plug-ins in your site.  These are independent pieces of software developed outside of WordPress used to add extra components to your site such as the facility to book appointments online.

It’s very important that your plugins maintain compatibility with your theme so that the speed of the site isn’t compromised.

Looks after website security

Websites are vulnerable to malware infections and external attacks. WordPress has a built-in security but it’s not hacker proof. Regular maintenance of plugins and themes can help prevent possible breaches. Unfortunately, the popularity of WordPress means that it can be a target for hackers.

According to a 2016 Sucuri report on infected websites, 74% were built on the WordPress platform and the number one cause of infection was outdated software and plugins.

Improve site performance

Regular maintenance allows for code optimisation or improvement in terms of quality and/or efficiency. It also means that images are compressed making them load faster and take up less hosting space.  Plus there’s ongoing checking and monitoring of links to make sure none are broken.  All of which contributes to improved site performance and speed.

Provides analysis of your website visitors

Professional web maintenance will provide you with analysis of your web traffic.  This includes the number and type of people who visit your site, how they find you and how they behave once they’re there; including which pages they visit and how long they stay on the site.  It also includes the bounce rate – which looks at the number of visitors who land on a page of your site but then don’t click through to another.  This might be because they’ve found what they’re looking for but perhaps the page quality is low, it doesn’t contain what the visitor expected or it was too slow.  In which case it might need reviewing.

Saves time and money

You are the expert in your business. Your time can be much better spent on doing what you do and are good at rather than on the technical management of your website. Regular maintenance keeps your site in good health and is almost always cheaper than trying to put something right when it has broken.  Plus, there’s no interruption to your web presence!

Gives peace of mind

Regular maintenance is essential to help protect against all sorts of potential dangers, including the ones most likely to cause a problem.  We like to call them the three Hs:

• Hosting: Web hosting security is essential to any site, whether business or personal. The hosting server should be adequately maintained to ensure attacks are minimised.
• Host Backup: Host with a sound backup is a plus. Backups on the host should be performed regularly to protect the site in case of a problem or disaster.
• Hacking: There are essentially two types of people out to harm your site. The most common and threatening is the identity thief.  The other is just out to cause disruption. In either case regular maintenance is essential as we have already discussed above.

At Critical Mission Computing we offer a maintenance service to all customers when we develop a new site.  WordPress is a fabulous platform which offers the customer the flexibility to manage their own content changes and updates.  However, we have found that most of our clients simply don’t want the hassle of being responsible for the technical maintenance. A professional maintenance contract ensures peace of mind for them.

At CMC, we strive to give you all of the above, and much more!