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Your WordPress website is a digital representation of your business. It is often your target customers’ first point of contact and has a strong influence over your business’s perceived value.
Unfortunately, many businesses take out the time to develop a website, only to leave it unattended after so long. One common reason businesses neglect their websites is that they simply believe their website doesn’t need updating. At the same time, some businesses just don’t prioritize website maintenance due to busy scheduling.
Regardless of the reason, one thing that’s for sure is that failing to have a WordPress maintenance plan can hurt your business in the long run. In fact, a lack of maintenance can lead to a host of issues including security breaches, unresponsive web design, data loss, and more.
WordPress Maintenance Plan: Why Does it Matter?
Keeping up with the technical side of your WordPress site can be a nuisance, especially for non-tech-savvy professionals. But even business owners who have the technical skills often don’t have the time to manage their website effectively.
But handling the tech side of things is just as important as any other part of your business. This is why all business owners should have a maintenance plan in place to ensure that their website always runs smoothly. Otherwise, failing to implement a maintenance plan can cost you a lot of money and stress that you can’t afford.
An effective WordPress maintenance plan improves things like user accessibility, search optimization, and security. Essentially, a WordPress maintenance plan enables you to operate more efficiently and confidently while seamlessly growing your business.
4 Reasons Businesses Need a WordPress Maintenance Plan
Maintaining your website should always be a top priority, but this is especially important if you have a WordPress website. WordPress is a content management system, which means that it provides an organizational structure for the website programmer’s code.
It also makes it easier for users to update and manage their websites. When you don’t maintain your website regularly, it opens the door to a host of problems that can negatively affect your business. Here are 4 reasons why you need a WordPress maintenance plan.
Security
WordPress is open-source, which means any programmer has access to use the code. This raises security risks for WordPress site owners, as this means that hackers have easy access to WordPress.
WordPress combats this by sending out updates. These updates are geared towards minor and sometimes major updates to the code. Users can keep their websites updated on the backend.
However, some updates are more complex and require a programmer to ensure the website remains compatible with the new version of WordPress. In addition to this, any plugins that your site has will need updates as well. The more plugins you have, the more your risk increases of security issues.
A WordPress maintenance plan enables businesses to stay on top of crucial updates that are needed for optimal security. It ensures that businesses have a standard process in place that allows for regular updates of themes and plugins to ensure that their website always has the best security.
Site Performance
Your website performance plays a key role in the success of your business. Sites that perform poorly have a harder time engaging their audience. In fact, studies show that 37% of visitors bounce when your site takes five seconds to load.
Ultimately, good or bad website performance correlates to user experience. But many businesses don’t realize just how many elements can have a negative impact on their site performance.
Even the slightest of changes need to be monitored to ensure your website is performing effectively. For instance, one of your plugins may experience a minor glitch that slows your site’s speed.
On the other hand, you might have changed a few details of your WordPress site, ultimately changing its layout and affecting navigation. Any one of these scenarios could decrease your site’s performance, which is why it’s best to adopt a WordPress maintenance plan.
A maintenance plan can help you navigate the inconsistencies that often come with the technical end of a website. When businesses can manage to avoid dips in their site performance, they can provide a better user experience and improve their rank in the search engine.
Backups
Another reason your website needs a maintenance plan is backups. Unfortunately, many businesses underestimate the importance of backing up their website until it’s too late.
When you don’t back up your website’s information, you run the risk of losing all of your important data. This includes content, customer information, and ultimately all of the hard work that you put into creating your WordPress site.
There are various scenarios where you could lose website data. For instance, if your website is hit with a cyberattack, there’s a strong possibility that you won’t be able to access your data or lose it altogether. However, backing up your website enables you to restore the last version of your site before it was hacked to recover some of your data.
Even if your site isn’t hacked, something as simple as a corrupt plugin can make your website stop working. For this reason, you want to ensure that you always have a recent backup ready when something like this occurs. With that said, having a maintenance plan in place means that your website can receive regular backups, giving you the peace of mind you deserve.
User Experience
User experience has always been important. But it’s becoming a central focus for website owners. For businesses to engage their audience, increase conversions, and keep a competitive edge, providing an optimal user experience is crucial.
This is further realized by the fact that WordPress powers an impressive 64 million websites. With so many businesses looking to set themselves apart, it will be the businesses that can truly appeal to their audience through a positive user experience that will succeed.
So how can businesses improve the user experience? If you haven’t guessed by now, this is achieved through an effective maintenance plan. A maintenance plan goes beyond improving the layout and navigation of your site. It’s about the small details that affect the way users interact with your website. This includes things such as:
- Site speed
- Broken links
- Poor theme
- 404 errors
- Security
The user experience is often tied directly to site performance. But it’s important to note that site performance is just one aspect of it. Improving the user experience requires a more comprehensive view of your website. This means that, in addition to site performance, you will need to examine other aspects of your website such as white space, images, content hierarchy, and page consistency, just to name a few.
Your WordPress website is an online representation of your company. As such, it’s essential that you implement a WordPress maintenance plan to manage all of the technical details that make a critical difference to your website.
An effective maintenance plan will help you fill gaps in your security measures by keeping everything up-to-date. It will also ensure that your site’s performance is optimal and consistent. Not only that, but a maintenance plan will ensure that you always have recent backups to protect data and will improve the user experience for better overall success.
