Websites unfortunately don’t maintain themselves. Between frequent update roll-outs and the ever-evolving threats to site security, investing in a maintenance plan ensures that all the hard work put into building your site wasn’t all for nothing.
When it comes to building a website and deciding on the platform on which to base it, many small businesses choose a WordPress site. Although less flexible than a site built in html it means that website owners can easily create and manage new content, change the site’s appearance and extend its functionality via plugins without any coding knowledge at all. But it still takes time, effort, and money to properly manage a WordPress site. Plugin, theme, and software updates all need to be carried out regularly.
Integrated Marketing Agency, Protean Inbound, outlines the often overlooked risks of a site that is neglected.
Why Ongoing WordPress Website Maintenance Is Important
A WordPress site is certainly not merely a one-time build. Just like a car or a building requires regular servicing and maintenance to repair breaks & clean up messes, a website needs some routine care to keep it in good shape. Neglecting any one component of website maintenance for too long results in an adverse impact for your customers, security and overall performance.
Side Effects Of An Infrequently Updated Site
If you go too long between updates or put them off because of the amount of work that goes into regular updates, a site begins to show signs of neglect. Here are some of the indicators of an infrequently updated WordPress site.
Page load problems
Leave your site unattended for too long and out-of-date plugins and unnecessary content, will bog your pages down. Long page-load times and crashing pages make the user experience unpleasant, and these issues may deter visitors from staying on the site for very long.
Elements cease to work
Not only do outdated plugins cause security issues, they can also make your website buggy. This can mean users who visit the site may encounter problems with broken features and other annoying bugs. A good example would be the issue that was occurring with the newsletter subscription form. Although it had only been added several weeks before there had already been an update in that time period. We updated the plugin for “Constant Contact Forms” and this solved the issue.
Poor SEO performance
In addition to harming the user friendliness of your site, lack of maintenance can cause crashes, and posts that contain broken links and other irrelevant information which hurt your SEO over time. Your search rankings fall if unattended problems effect user interaction and page views on your site.
It Costs More NOT To Maintain Your Site
Ignoring WordPress maintenance can be very costly down the line.
Not only can a poorly performing site push potential clients away; and that’s definitely not good for business, but potential security threats and data losses could take ages to fix. Malware removal alone could cost substantially.
A WordPress maintenance plan should be viewed as preventive medicine. Aim to keep your site healthy and avoid the trouble and hefty price of a website that’s either been hacked, lost a substantial amount of data or reduced to the white screen of death.
If you need WordPress support & help with maintenance Protean Inbound can help. They offer packages to include upgrading CMS, themes and modules; fixing technical issues or coding problems; streamlining back-end administration; improving design and audio-visual display; maximising browser and mobile/tablet compatibility.