Just like any software, your website requires maintenance to keeping the site working properly. Avoiding website maintenance is like not having regular oil changes on your car. You wouldn’t drive your car very long if you didn’t look after it on a regular basis, would you? Well, the same thing is true for your website. Your website should always be live, ready for customers and presenting your business at its finest.
Websites Are Not a “Set and Forget”
If you don’t have website maintenance carried out on a regular basis (weekly or monthly), you may actually be throwing your money out the window. When visitors go to a website and find things wrong with it, they often don’t hang around. Many website owners never check their website to see how it’s functioning. Missed website issues or downtime can lose you potential customers.
The Benefits of Regular Maintenance
Many people don’t realize the benefits of regular website maintenance:
The websites performance, it’s load time, downtime and uptime, is all dependent on the WordPress software and plugin functioning as they should (and on the recent versions).
The website growth, it’s fresh content, analytics monitoring and design changes, are all dependent on you having someone making sure all updates to the website are done in a smooth and error-free fashion.
Our Maintenance Workflow
At Think Big Web we take great care to first backup your website, and check the website after our updates for any issues. Our software keeps a record of plugins we update so if there is ever an issue we see what plugin version was changed and revert back. Also included in our monthly maintenance report are the performance and security scans. If in the event we ever catch a plugin issue, it becomes a support ticket and we address it before you ever know there’s a problem.
The Dangers of Do It Yourself Maintenance
Maintaining your website yourself could cost you more than you may think. If you just update from your WordPress admin, you wouldn’t have a record of what was done. If an update to a plugin created an issue a couple weeks later, it would be difficult to know what changed and how you should change back without restoring a very old backup (and possibly losing content changes, orders, contacts, you name it).
It Costs More to Fix Than to Maintain
Inexperience and neglect can damage the functionality & look of your website. When that happens, you have a choice to make. One, you try and fix the website yourself, in which case you might cause further damage. Or two, you can then pay the (sometimes hefty) price for someone experienced to fix it for you. Just like your car, it costs more to fix a website than it does to maintain it properly. Regular oil changes help keep your car running properly, regular website maintenance helps keeps your web site running properly.
Call in a Professional
Why not deal with what you know best and let us deal with what we know best? Would you try to fight that court battle without a lawyer? Then why try to maintain your own website if you’re not a web professional? By securing experienced web professionals to update and maintain your website properly you are actually saving potential lost sales and visitors.
If you’re interested in securing a maintenance contract for your web site, contact us to learn how we can keep your site in proper working order.
You can read more about our Website Care Plans here.