The Importance Of Website Maintenance – And The Cost When You Don’t!

It’s easy to remember to book in your cleaner once your starts office looking like a teenagers bedroom, but it’s harder to remember to schedule your website maintenance. Once it is launched, you go back into the day-to-day of running your business and it drops on the list of priorities…

But, just because you don’t ‘see’ it, doesn’t mean that it isn’t vitally important to your business!

Why should you prioritise website maintenance?

Protection against hackers!

There are many smart and dodgy individuals out there who make it their business to steal your valuable data (and your customer’s!) – but regular updates make their job much more difficult.

WordPress is a bright red target for hackers, malicious code distributors and data thieves as it currently powers about 23% of all the websites in the world! However, because it is such a high performing CMS, there are top-level security experts studying the code for security bugs around-the-clock and a WordPress team diligently creating updates to fix and protect against them.

If you are staying on top of the latest updates, you are in the best position to protect your site from anyone trying to target your data.

You’ve spent a lot of time and money on your website, not committing to regular maintenance is putting all of that at risk – if you get hacked or hit by a malicious virus, you might be back to square one!

Do I need to update my plugins too?

You sure do – add them to your maintenance list! Plugins can also be exploited by hackers or not perform as well if they aren’t running on the latest version.

You don’t want to update your site and leave your plugins behind – they might not work as well together and cause problems visually or functionally for your customers.

But my web developer told me it’s not important to update?

RUN!

If your web developer doesn’t understand the value of security updates – they don’t care about your business!

They might advise you not to update immediately, as sometime after a WordPress update (especially a big one) some code changes might not mix well with certain bits of your theme or plugin(s) coding. If that happens, you’ll find a few conflicts between your theme and the new, updated WordPress, or a plugin, or even all three.

Sometimes, depending on the update, it is ok to wait a while so all the bugs are ironed out before you use it, but if any of the updates are regarding security – update immediately!

Security matters.

If your developer thinks otherwise, it’s time to part ways.

Are you staying on top of your website maintenance?

We believe regular maintenance is better than trying to cure a virus or recover stolen data – so if we can give you a hand with protecting your website, just get in touch with our team!