How Website Maintenance is Essential for Your Business And Mental Health.
The Problem
When was the last time you did software updates on your website? Is your website software still up to date, secure and optimised to work properly? You don’t have the time or don’t think it is a priority? Think again. Today, we’ll discuss why website maintenance is essential for your business and mental health.
Websites require regular maintenance to keep your website working properly, just like any software system or your car. Would your car work as well and be safe to drive if you didn’t do regular tune ups like changing oils, batteries and tyres? Are your brakes still working as they should? They may still work but not as well as they used to. Neglecting website maintenance would be the same. As time goes by, your website can become vulnerable to hackers, become glitchy or buggy and thus, drag down its performance. Your website should be bug free, always up and running, ready for your audience and presenting your business at its best. Regular website maintenance is essential for that to happen.
Myth #1: Websites are “Set and Forget”.
Many business owners never check how their website is operating. You are too busy, or don’t think it’s a priority. Things can break if not maintained. That’s a fact. You are doing more harm than good by not having your website maintenance done every month. Outdated software versions can cause security risks and bugs. A buggy website causes bad user experience. Your audience loses trust and confidence in your brand and business. Or worse, your site is down or hacked. Visitors will simply leave your website and look elsewhere.
Thus, you are giving potential leads to your competitors.
How many are you losing everyday?
Myth #2: I can just get WordPress to ‘auto update’ everything.
There are many steps in doing proper website maintenance. In WordPress version 5.5, it introduced a feature that can automatically update WordPress Core, themes and plugins. It sounds perfect, right? Not exactly. WordPress Core is the engine of the website and generally rolls out updates first. However, theme and plugin developers need time to catch up to make their software compatible with the newly released WordPress Core version. Thus, automatically updating blindly can cause incompatible version clashing. Bugs occur and things can break. It could be one or few functions becoming buggy or worse, it can break the whole site. You need to be very careful when performing updates. Make sure you make a backup before making changes. Double check things aren’t breaking when updating software or changes. This way, you can always restore your website if things do break.
The Benefits & Importance that make Website Maintenance Essential
Many business owners don’t realise the importance and benefits of website maintenance.
1. Peace of mind
Get peace of mind knowing your website is up to date, secure, optimised to run at its best and always live to serve your audience.
2. Don’t leak leads to your competitors.
Your audience expects a bug free website. Keep it that way with Website Maintenance.
3. Prevention is the best cure.
Save money by doing regular tune ups instead of letting small issues become a big problem that is more costly for you and your business to fix.
Your website deserves time and effort invested into it so it can serve your audience and your business at its best. Your website’s performance and growth requires someone monitoring its health so it stays up to date, secure, high performing and running properly. You’ll stress less and be worry free as well.
Essential Maintenance Workflow
At Karasu Designs, we are WordPress experts that have been making websites for over 10 years. We love taking care of our clients’ website as we believe all websites deserve the love and care they need to perform best. We know business owners don’t have the expertise to do it themselves. If they do, they don’t have the time to do it. That’s where we come in.
- We’ll do a Website Health Check to see if your website is serviceable. Some websites may be so broken it needs to be rebuilt from scratch.
- If we can service your site, we’ll backup the website first before we begin work.
- We’ll clone your site onto our Premium Webhosting so you can see the speed difference by simply hopping onto our optimised WordPress cloud servers.
- Check the website for issues after our software updates are done.
- Our system keeps a record of plugin versions we update so always revert back if there are issues. And we can restore the site too if needed.
- Our monthly maintenance reports also include performance and security scans. We’ll harden your security and malware scans to further protect your site. If your site is ever hacked, we’ll do malware removal for free*.
- We’ll monitor your site uptime 24/7 and will get your site back up and running asap if it goes down.
- We’ll have not one, but two off-site backups of your entire site every (12, 6 or 1 hour depending on plan) for easy restore for whatever reason. If our servers go down (which rarely happens), we’ll still have a copy of your website in two other locations just to be super safe.
- We’ll use CDN (Content Delivery Network) technology and Premium Plugins ($150 per month if bought separately) to make your website even faster.
It’s More Expensive to Fix Than to Maintain
Neglect and inexperience can break the look and functionality of your website. When that happens, you have three routes you can take. One, you try and fix it yourself, risking possible further damage. Two, do nothing and hope the issue magically goes away and let little issues become a big issue later down the track. Or three, you can pay the (sometimes hefty) price for someone experienced to fix it. Just like your car, it costs more to fix it than it does to maintain it properly. Regular oil changes help keep your car running properly, regular site maintenance helps keep your web site running properly.
Always Use a Professional
Save time and energy for something else. Why not deal with what you know best and let us deal with what we know best? Would you try to fix your own car or get a mechanic to get it fixed? Then why try to maintain your own website if you’re not a web professional?
By securing an experienced web professional to update and maintain your site properly you are actually saving time, money and potential lost leads and visitors in the long run.
- Sleep better at night knowing your website is always live, ready to serve your audience.
- Know you’re in good hands and stress less when things do break.
- No need to panic if your site gets hacked as you have a professional take care of it for you.
If you’re interested in securing website maintenance for your website, schedule a call to learn which plan is right for your business.
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