Why Maintenance is Critical to a Successful Website
Like any computer, websites require updates and maintenance in order to work properly. Similar to a vehicle, websites have a lot of moving pieces that can break and cause your site to go down if you are not careful. Websites need regular updates and attention, just like vehicles need regular oil changes. You don’t want your website to be down when that potential customer comes looking, do you?
Trust us, we have seen many websites that have been neglected. Often times you may find that your website has been hacked, there are links to spam or viruses on the website, and the site has been black listed by Google and other major search engines. It is best to avoid going down this road and having a website that is down for maintenance. Your website should always be live, ready for customers and presenting your business at its finest.
Websites Are Not a “Set It and Forget It”
Without website maintenance carried out monthly, you might actually be losing money. If a visitor goes to your website and find things wrong with it, they often exit the site immediately. Most website owners don’t check their website to see how it’s functioning and performing regularly. A missed website issue or any downtime can cause you to lose customers.
Maintenance Benefits
Let’s talk about the benefits of regular site maintenance:
It is important to understand that website load time, performance, uptime, and error free pages are all dependent on the WordPress software and any plugin that is also on the website.
However, new and exciting content, analytics reporting, design changes, and growth are all dependent on someone making all these changes. In addition, this person must check for errors and make sure the content looks great on the site.
Our Maintenance Workflow
At Mountaintop Web Design we work hard so you don’t have to. Our process ensures your website and company is protected at all times. Each time we work on your website, we make sure that we backup your website. We then make the needed updates, then verify that the website is performing without any issues. We even keep a record of the plugins that we update, which will help us troubleshoot any errors on the website. This ensures a speedy update and minimizes downtime. Additionally, our monthly processes include scanning your website for potential security or performance issues. At the end of the month, we send you a monthly report that shows the items updated, results from the performance and security scans, and much more!
Why Not Just Do It Yourself?
While it appears to be cheaper from the outset, maintaining your website by yourself could actually be more expensive than you may think. While it is easy to update from the backend of your website, you will not have a record of what updates were done. If an update to a plugin causes an issue a couple of weeks down the road, it would be very tough to figure out which plugin caused the the problems. Without knowing this, you would have to restore an old backup of your website, which means you could lose recent content, sales orders, contact entries, and more.
It Costs More to Fix Than to Maintain
Similar to a vehicle, websites can be inexpensive to maintain on a regular basis. Where people get into trouble is when a website breaks causing problems with the look and functionality of the site. This can happen if a website is neglected or if regular maintenance was performed incorrectly. When a website does break (like a vehicle), it can be expensive to hire an expert to fix it (especially when the website has been hacked). Regular site maintenance by an expert will help keep your site running properly.
Call an Expert
Why not deal with what you know best and let us deal with what we know best? Would you try to do surgery without a doctor?
Why try to maintain your website if you are not a web professional? If you secure an expert web professional to update and maintain your website, you will have the peace of mind that your website will be up when potential customers come looking.
If you’re interested in our Extreme WordPress Care Plans for your website, contact us to learn about our different support options.
