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So you have your beautiful website all set up – aside from a few content updates here and there, you’re good to go. You can sit back, relax, and just let the rest take care of itself, right? After all, you set up your website to support your business, and that is what you want to focus on.
While the temptation may be to focus all your energy on your business and not much on your website, this is not the best plan. Yes, WordPress is fantastically easy to use and you can create a perfect website, but once your site is up and running, you need to think about maintenance.
You may wonder why you should consider maintenance of your WordPress site, and how you can go about this. Here we seek to answer those questions for you, and discover how maintaining your website can result in the best performance, and be a great business decision. Your website is a key asset to your business, so it’s important you should always protect it.
Curate your content
We have all gone to a website only to find the page we wanted displays an error message, or we go to click on an affiliate link and it is broken. This can be not only annoying, it can discourage potential customers or clients from interacting with a website at all. From the point of view of someone running a website (and, indeed, a business), this could be a disaster.
Make sure you are staying on top of your content. Not only will keeping it all up to date ensure that you’re never caught out with information that is outdated and irrelevant, it also helps to retain those who visit your website.
A new look
Along the same lines as content, a good website maintenance plan will include looking at the design of your website. Keeping the site fresh and interesting to look at and use is incredibly important – after all, a website is a very visual experience.
WordPress Designers/Developers can change/update your design when you need, so updating the look and feel of your site could not be easier. It has also been stated that an updated and well-designed website can increase positive feelings in users towards the site overall. Conversely, a bad website is unlikely to be visited again and can make you look unprofessional.
Keep it clean, modern and regularly updated to give visitors to your site the best chance of seeing how great you and your site is!
Become hacker proof
Alright, there may not be any such thing as being completely hacker proof, but WordPress is well set up to defend against hacking attacks already. Because WordPress is one of the most widely used and popular CMS online, it is often vulnerable to a wider range of attacks. This can result in everything from website slowdowns to full-scale data theft or content changed on your website.
WordPress is very conscious of this and integrates a range of hacking protection behind the scenes. However, you can keep your website ever safe by remembering to get updates that WordPress offers, deleting old plugins and pages, and updating your system regularly.
All of these things will help you to defend against hacker attacks.
Back up
We all back up our documents on our laptops and computers, but we rarely consider backing up our websites. Hackers can sometimes harm your data, but this is not the only way that your website may become corrupted or even unusable.
Something as simple as a power outage can result in data loss that could be potentially devastating to you and/or your business. Whether this happens because of hardware or software issues, or because of something as simple as server issues, the end result is the same – you will lose something valuable and it could be costly, time consuming, and perhaps even impossible to recover.
You can get a plugin which will help you to back up your data regularly, or have your web developers manage it for you and cover this. This is the perfect way to keep everything and everyone safe, with no unexpected data losses to content with.
Improve the user journey
This might feel like an obvious point, but a website that does not have a regular maintenance plan can look sloppy, unkempt, and be harder to use for your average user. Whether these are existing customers or potential clients, contending with a host of broken links and blank pages can be hard to get past.
Having a website that has been properly maintained means that all of the information found on it will be relevant, timely, and your website will be in good health, so the pages will load quickly, improving the journey through using the website overall.
This can only encourage longer and also repeat visits – so paying out initially to keep your site well maintained and up to date really pays off for you in the long run.
Count your pennies
While it might seem like an unnecessary outgoing to maintain your website, you will find that this is not the case. Hopefully, from all the previous points made, you can see how vitally important it is to make website maintenance an important part of your plan. Not only does it result in an improved website overall, it can also help to save you money.
A website with broken links, poorly performing SEO and error pages galore is sure to repel potential customers or other interested parties. If you keep your website current and secure, you can retain customers and/or clients.
This isn’t the only way that a website maintenance plan can help you to save money. If you fail to maintain your website and this results in data or content losses, you may have to employ another professional to not only recover the data (if possible) but to update your site so it is user-friendly. If you suffer from malware and other viruses and corruptions, this could become even more expensive.
It really is best to spend the money initially to keep your website maintained, rather than waiting until the worst happens, but unfortunate this is what a lot of people do and it’s like you bolting the gate once the horse has already gone.
Put your performance to the test
If you have been making a lot of changes to your website, such as uploading new information and pages, installing new plugins, themes and so on, you may be surprised to know that this can impact the overall performance of your WordPress site. If this sounds familiar, then optimising your website should be top of your list.
Yes – even keeping your site up to date can result in a slow down! You should review the speed of your pages loading and assess the performance of your website regularly, just to be sure it is working optimally.
Once it is, then so can you!
An overview of what you need
So, what exactly do you need to keep your site in optimal health? Here is a brief list of things you need to look at and ensure you have a professional looking after your WordPress site for you:
1. Make sure you take advantage of all the WordPress core updates that the platform offers.
2. Update your plugins and modules regularly and delete unused ones.
3. Back up your website.
4. Utilise performance optimisation.
5. Think about uptime monitoring, clean-ups from hacking and security.
6. Ensure all your forms work and there is no broken links.
Are you ready to get on top of your WordPress maintenance? Whether your website has just been launched or you are looking to freshen up an older website, remember that maintaining your site is the best way to protect and improve it, so you can reach more people and enjoy running your business website hopefully hassle free.
Please fill our our enquiry form if you would like to know more about our services or are looking for costings to manage your website maintenance for you.