Website maintenance is often an overlooked part of website ownership — especially for small businesses with a tight IT budget. But failing to maintain your site on a regular basis can lead to potentially serious problems for your business.
If you’ve been lax about website maintenance, resolve to make 2021 the year you start keeping your WordPress website in tip-top shape. Here’s why it’s so important — and how PixelPeople can make it easier.
What’s Involved In Website Maintenance?
A lot of website maintenance includes making updates and patches — just as you update your personal computer’s operating system or your phone’s apps. Updates fix bugs, improve performance, enhance security, and sometimes they’re even required for your website to continue running on WordPress.
In many cases, you could perform your own website updates, but (a) you have to remember to complete the updates on a regular basis, and (b) many people put them off because they worry about what would happen if the update causes an issue on their site.
While a lot of updates can be completed automatically with the click of a button, it’s always important to proceed with caution, as some updates can cause issues. If your website’s code or server isn’t compatible with the update, it could take your site offline. So it’s understandable that some website owners are hesitant to make updates themselves.
However, in addition to potential downtime, ignoring website maintenance can have other negative consequences, such as:
- Speed and performance issues
- Security and data breaches
- Broken links and page errors
- Failed backups and lost data
- Broken forms, buttons, and other elements
Any of these can be problematic for your business, your website users, and your customers.
The Benefits Of Outsourcing Website Maintenance
An experienced developer will often know if there are any compatibility issues going into an update, or they can revert the update to quickly find a solution and get your website back up. But if you don’t have an in-house IT department or developer on call, outsourcing website maintenance is an affordable and reliable solution.
When you outsource website maintenance, you don’t have to worry about remembering to make updates. And, you don’t have to worry about making a mistake and breaking your website. The agency you outsource to employs expert developers that will maintain your website, perform updates, and conduct regular scans to keep it healthy and operational around the clock.
And professional website maintenance programs often include additional benefits, adding value to the process and giving you all the more reason to leave this job to the pros.
How PixelPeople Adds Value to Our Website Maintenance Program
A professional website maintenance service takes the worry and burden off your plate, while providing a host of other benefits and valuable information about your website. For example, at PixelPeople, our WordPress website maintenance program includes:
- Installation of available WordPress core, theme, and plugin updates once a week
- Weekly optimization of your database, so changes won’t slow down your website
- Daily security scans, to ensure your website is protected
- Daily backups of your files and your database, in case a breach or crash should occur
- Scanning for broken links, which can frustrate your users and harm your SEO
- Uptime monitoring and reporting
- Google Analytics reporting
- A formatted PDF report including all of the above, delivered to your email inbox every week.
We recently reduced the cost of our weekly maintenance plan to make it more affordable for small businesses during these difficult times, and any WordPress site is eligible for our program. So stop putting off website maintenance, and make 2021 the year you resolve to keep your site in tip-top shape!
Feel free to contact us directly at (877) 860-3903 or [email protected] with any questions. We’re always happy to help.