If your website is built on the WordPress platform you’ll be accustomed to the frequent notifications that pop up on the updates section of your dashboard. Here you will see updates attributed to WordPress itself, the theme you have active, and the plugins that support your site.
These updates form part of a wider range of website maintenance tasks that are essential for your site to remain secure, healthy and up-to-date.
In this article, we discuss the what, why, when and how of WordPress maintenance and whether outsourcing could be right for you.
Maintenance is vital to the smooth running of your website. It’s a set of important tasks that need to be actioned frequently for your site to offer the best possible experience whilst keeping your visitors and their data secure.
Websites are integral to the success of a business. They are live 365 days a year, promoting your brand and your visitors expect a great experience when they visit your site. So it is of utmost importance that your site is properly maintained.
Just like a car requires a service, websites require ongoing care. Website maintenance covers a range of tasks including; WordPress, plugin, and theme updates, taking backups, managing broken links, optimising the database, and performance optimization amongst others.
Failing to keep the website updated, having no backups, and ignoring website security are three of the most common mistakes that website owners make.
When website maintenance is forgotten about, your WordPress version, theme, and plugins will quickly become outdated. This leaves your website vulnerable to malicious threats such as Malware and hacking which are not only costly to resolve, but damage user trust and your reputation.
Outdated plugins can cause compatibility issues and cause your site to display in a strange format, or completely crash and become inaccessible to visitors.
In this day and age internet users are not used to waiting around, they expect a website to load within a matter of seconds, and when it doesn’t they’ll instantly bounce to another website.
Unmaintained websites become slow which leads to poor user experiences and traffic loss that can negatively impact a business. What’s more, search engines such as Google majorly favour quick-loading websites that are kept updated. If your site is slow or your software is outdated, it will suffer from decreasing rankings on the search engine results page.
Using our experience, we recommend carrying out maintenance activities on your website every week to ensure your site runs optimally.
This will allow you to keep on top of any newly released updates and pick up any issues with your website such as broken links and security vulnerabilities.
Most third-party providers will offer a range of packages to suit websites of different sizes and complexities.
We offer three packages with different levels of support that meet the needs of every type of website.
You can also maintain your site yourself if you are equipped to do so. However, it can be time-consuming and mistakes can lead to your site not being fully protected and downtime. This means in some cases partnering with a professional is recommended.
Frequent website maintenance results in increased security, more uptime and better experiences for your visitors. It is also true that preventive maintenance not only gives you peace of mind but can save you time and money in the long run.
Maintaining your website yourself is not always the best way forward and comes with challenges such as a lack of knowledge if you’re not a website expert or professional.
Outsourcing website maintenance has many distinct advantages. It puts a reliable system in place that ensures performance and security, giving you complete peace of mind. There’s also time savings to consider. By outsourcing maintenance, you will free up time to focus on other areas of your business.
Whilst maintenance packages command monthly or annual costs, they are generally much lower than hiring an in-house professional or paying to fix your website when something goes wrong. Investing in prevention is more cost-effective than the cure.
At Aspire, we build long-term relationships with our clients to ensure that their website is in the best possible condition. Our website maintenance packages have been put together to keep our clients’ sites running securely, updated and ready to serve their visitors.
On top of the core maintenance activities, we like to go a step further in making value-adding optimisations to our client’s websites. This includes optimising images to help your site run quicker, making your site more accessible and inclusive, admin tasks such as adding new users and much more.
In our experience, other website maintenance providers tend to work ‘behind the scenes’ and only contact clients when they need something. This is not our style. We believe that you should be kept in the loop which is why we are always in regular contact with our clients. We itemise the work completed and provide tangible results through detailed reporting.
To complement website maintenance, we offer additional website support to clients. Common support includes creating landing pages, uploading blogs, updating content and adding new features. We also offer website design, SEO, paid media, and social media services.
If you own or manage a WordPress website and would like to discuss our website maintenance, security and support packages, please get in touch.
Whether you have initial questions, a full project brief, or something in between, the team at Aspire are ready. Get in touch with us using the form and we will be in touch at the first opportunity.
The Racquets Court, College Street, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, NE1 8JG
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