Spoiler alert: Your WordPress website won’t be fully functional for eternity once it’s live.
After you’ve finalized the design phase and ready with the development sprint, and finally publish your project to the web, you have to factor in the ongoing maintenance. Without recurring support and digital housekeeping, you risk all the hard work that you’ve put into the making of your WordPress website and miss on opportunities to scale your business.
A quality WordPress maintenance service can help you have a stable website with a flawless performance that will fight off hackers and security threats 24/7. With that, users can feel safe on your WordPress site and you’ll get to keep your business reputation.
Why Does WordPress Maintenance Matter?
As a matter of fact, running a website is a challenging and ongoing endeavor. Content creation, SEO tasks, and ongoing development work must be handled competently.
When discussing WordPress maintenance, most people assume that the only tasks related to it are updating the WordPress Core, themes, and plugins as they are released. They also believe that they can handle it themselves.
Any professional WordPress agency would structure a comprehensive plan including the full cycle of support and web management activities, such as:
- Version control management (GitHub or Bitbucket)
- Staging environments (never deploy straight to production)
- Maintaining deployment pipelines
- Automated code quality linters and additional tools for code integrity
- Release schedules
- Security release procedures
- Integrated united or functional tests
- Ongoing monitoring of website stability
- Live monitoring of any security leaks in installed plugins
This is by no means a comprehensive solution – and diving into the core principles of growth will inevitably raise the needs for additional growth support: SEO, conversion rate optimization, A/B testing, landing page development, enhanced editorial workflows for productivity, categorization and pillar development, among others.
From a functional standpoint:
WordPress errors may occur if you don’t know how to look after website assets properly. It can result in shallow security and if you have a broken website, you’ll lose your existing web visitors and potential clients. With a non-secure website, your business can easily become a victim of website hacking, which could be pretty hard to recover from.
A non-maintained WordPress website can also result in slow-loading pages that will turn users off, poor UX, and consequently, diminished search rankings. As a WordPress website owner, you can avoid all these troubles by opting for a quality WordPress maintenance service.
Infographic: Eight Benefits to Having Your WordPress Site Professionally Maintained
What Is Included in a WordPress Maintenance Service?
WordPress maintenance plays a major role in securing your website from a variety of possible threats such as SQL injections, brute force attacks, malware, as well as making sure that your WordPress website Core, themes, and plugins are updated.
Aside from updates and security checks, there are a few other tasks that belong in the category of WordPress maintenance. When you look for a website maintenance provider, these are the tasks and responsibilities that will guarantee a sturdy maintenance process:
- WordPress Stack Update: You’ll need reliable and safe updates of your CMS, its plugins, and themes, without breaking the website or making it inaccessible for the users.
- Backups: If you regularly update the content on your WordPress website, you may need a database backup once a day at a minimum and a complete weekly or monthly backup as well. A quality provider will keep these backups automated and they won’t disrupt the user’s experience during the backup process.
- Server and Uptime Monitoring: Monitoring your WordPress resources and notifying you in case of unexpected activity, depleting resources, or other anomalies in order to prevent downtime.
- Version Control: Code changes need to be versioned. This will give you a track record of your previous changes so you can safely revert to the previous version.
- Log Monitoring: You’ll need a bulletproof code if you want your WordPress website to run smoothly. If you have a broken plugin or scripts, internal logs need to be monitored and the issues need to be handled in order for the system to remain stable.
- Technical Content Updates: A service provider that is proven it the field of WordPress will format your meta titles, tags, and descriptions properly, followed a beautiful designed content and coding structure, and according to the SEO friendly principles.
- Ongoing Maintenance & Security: Your CMS must be constantly monitored, analyzed and tested for compatibility, stability, and speed.
- Staging Environment: If it’s not safe to test on your live website, a secure clone of your website is better for testing new updates without causing any potential harm to the live website.
- Automated Regression Testing: Regular automation testing of your WordPress website that can constantly discover and prevent possible causes of UI or functional regressions.
Your Benefits from Professional Website Maintenance
1. A Secure WordPress Website
When your site gets hacked, it might be too late to realize just how important having a safe WordPress website is. Having a hacked website sucks, and opting for a WordPress retainer plan will ensure that each threat will be prevented and properly resolved.
Your WordPress website isn’t safe with installing a theme and a plugin right out of the gate. Although it’s essential to have security plugins and backup opportunities, you can’t rely solely on a rollback when a problem occurs. Yes, installing WordPress is easy, and adding a security plugin is even easier but, the more you add to your website, the bigger are the chances are for it to be hacked.
Poorly coded themes and plugins open the door for problems with updating your installation. If updates are not done regularly, that could prevent you from taking advantage of recent bug fixes in the Core, your theme or plugins, and thus create a security breach. Having access to professional WordPress maintenance and development services, you’ll be making sure that your website is constantly safe.
2. Better UX and Accessibility
What’s the point of having a WordPress website if it constantly shows errors to the users or interrupts the user experience?
If your website is not functional, users will leave immediately and visit the website of a competitor. That results in lost sales and it’s very bad for your brand overall. With a quality WordPress maintenance service, your website errors will be captured and eliminated on a regular basis.
This, in turn, will provide a better experience for users and you will obtain more customers for your business.
3. Improved SEO and Web Performance
Optimizing your WordPress website for speed is one of the crucial tasks of ongoing maintenance and development.
Page speed is one of the vital factors that Google uses to rank your website. An increased website speed comes from content, code, scripts, and database optimizations. A proper optimization process will not only increase website load speed, but it can also help in eliminating potential security weaknesses.
4. Better Conversions and User Experience
Your target users are busy people, as we all are. This is why long website loading times are not an option if you want to provide a good user experience. If your website is not fast enough on your users’ computers or smartphones, you can say goodbye to potential customers and online business growth.
Your industry, market, and your customers’ user behavior constantly change. Reacting nimbly and quickly to their needs is crucial for a sustainable business. Agility is a must if your website is an important monetization asset for your operations.
Once you find that your website no longer navigates users to what they are looking for and your conversions drop, an ongoing development partner is the one to make quick and effective changes for you without adding technical debt to your platform.
5. Focusing on Your Business
No business owner likes spending the majority of their time in putting out fires instead of looking for growth opportunities. Would you rather be busy developing new business strategies or worry about solving ongoing troubleshooting of problems with your WordPress site?
When using WordPress, you need to at least make sure that automatic backups are happening as well as take action towards updating plugins and themes.
And while doing that, there are often myriad things that can go wrong. You simply can’t afford the time if you need to spend it on developing and enhancing your business and sales strategies. That’s why when you delegate the technical tasks, you can focus on what you do best – developing new products and services, optimizing operations, and implementing new marketing strategies that lead to more revenue.
6. Protecting Your Investment
A WordPress website is a business asset, and an investment for the long-term. Custom themes, templates, media, unique photography, content, it all adds up to your initial web development investment. So why risk and having all that break down if you don’t know how to maintain it. Again, investing in a quality WordPress Retainer Plan protects your investment in the first place and increases its initial value even further. Professional development provides for a clean code that follows the WordPress Coding Standards, makes your website easily maintainable, and prevents unexpected recurring costs.
DevriX provides WordPress retainers and technical support for enterprises and fast-paced startups. So far, we’ve developed and scaled WordPress platforms that generate up to 200,000,000 page views per month! That involves a lot of maintenance, but building a reliable and scalable WordPress solution is not a one-off project.
Through continuous testing and optimization, we’ll dig down to the core of your UX and find the perfect formula that will increase your website’s conversion rates.
With regular WordPress maintenance, we can learn more about your business and in the process, we could efficiently implement new features on your website that will increase your return on investment.
7. Reducing Lost Business
Downtime not only means that your website is not consistent, but also that you are losing business. If your website is also your online store, any downtime at all means lost revenue. The longer the downtime, the more the problem compounds. So, unless you can afford to lose valuable customers, you need a professional site. Website maintenance services can reduce the chance of downtime, and prevent lost business.
By protecting your site, you are ensuring that the business will continue to operate even if things go south. This allows for solid planning and ensures no unnecessary risks with regards to finances and problems with business operation.
The uncertainty surrounding financial stability does not have a place in stable businesses. In fact, it can lead them towards bankruptcy because there isn’t any hard data from which you could work off when analyzing the situation. Thus, a professional WordPress agency is your best bet to have a high-earning, reliable business website.
8. Getting Extra Creativity Input
A professional company can customize a website with more features compared to a freelancer, for example, working on several projects simultaneously. Web design is more than just making websites, it’s also about creativity and skills. On the contrary, non-professionals might not be aware of all the features that can now adorn your site.
Also, bear in mind for the success of your website, looks are important for first impression, but functionality is what comes next. A professional WordPress maintenance team knows where to place features like payment buttons and social media icons so that they can increase traffic while making you stand out.
Investing in expert technical expertise will help you get more out of each visit from potential customers on search engines. After all, functionality needs equal attention when designing sites for digital consumption.
Level Up the WordPress Maintenance Solutions
WordPress Development Retainers are the prime option if you need consistent maintenance and development work for your WordPress website. The WordPress Development Retainer Plan is a long-term development, support, and innovation for your WordPress platform.
Related:
- WordPress Retainers 101: The Complete DevriX Tutorial
- Why Professional Companies Pay for Professional WordPress Maintenance
Successful businesses grow online through their websites by scaling powerful WordPress solutions. WordPress Retainers are designed to ensure that your WordPress platform follows the latest coding standards and features, while at the same time take care of optimizing your website for speed, security, and usability. A WordPress Retainer Plan will fully cover the following perks and so much more:
Wrapping Up
Paying for a professional WordPress maintenance service is not an uncommon thing. In fact, as we mentioned above, you need to look at it as an investment in your business growth. It’s similar to buying a new car. If you don’t maintain the engine, if you don’t wash it, and if you don’t keep it protected in winter, it will get old and rusty quickly.
This is why it’s not hard to see the value of a quality WordPress maintenance service and how it benefits your business. Make sure that you have a consistent maintenance process and you’ll soon reap the rewards from your investment in the form of growing your brand, increasing web traffic and finding new ways to monetize it, optimize conversions and increase your revenue flow.