Just like a car, websites require maintenance to keep them working. Your car won’t take you very far if you never change its oil, and your website won’t take your business very far if you don’t look after it. You want your website’s engine raring and ready to present your business to the world.
Why Website Maintenance is Worth It
If you’re not taking care of your website’s maintenance on a monthly basis, you could be throwing all that money you invested in it out the window. When visitors show up at a website that’s missing information, slow, or doesn’t work the way the expect it to, they don’t stay very long. Too many website owners don’t keep an eye on their website after it’s launched, and then never know about the issues that are costing them customers.
If you keep WordPress and its plugins up-to-date, your site will load more quickly, experience less downtime, and be more secure. If you’re regularly adding new content to your site and tracking its analytics, your site will reward you with better SEO and your customers will keep coming back to see what’s new.
The Website Care Process
At Just Peachy, we’re pretty passionate about keeping websites running their best. We keep regular backups of all the websites we maintain and update WordPress and the site’s plugins on a weekly basis. After running updates, we thoroughly check the site for any issues. Since our software keeps track of when we last updated each plugin, it’s easy to track down which plugin is causing issues and resolve them.
We also run security scans to make sure nothing nefarious is happening on a website, and we’re on all the important mailing lists so we’re the first to learn about vulnerabilities in popular plugins. If we get a whiff of a plugin issue, it becomes a support task and is addressed before the site owner even realizes there’s a problem.
Every month, we review the site’s performance, toss out spam comments, and optimize the database. We also add content or adjust features by request, so the site is always fresh. Then, our clients get a beautiful report that lets them know how their site is doing.
DIY Website Care
At Just Peachy, we believe in our clients. We know you’re intelligent, ambitious, and quick-to-learn. That’s why our first-ever blog post, Tips for a Happy and Healthy WordPress Site, walks through the basics of maintaining your website yourself. We’re never going to tell you maintaining your WordPress website yourself is easy (that would be a lie), but we’re also not here to tell you it’s beyond your capabilities. If you’re down for learning how to care for your site yourself, we’ll be on the sidelines cheering you on.
Our care plans are for two types of business owner:
- The business owner who wants a wonderful website that presents their business to world, but isn’t interested in devoting dozens of hours to learning the intricacies of how their website works and how to keep it running well. Not everyone wants to change their own oil and not everyone wants to maintain their own website. We get it.
- The busy business owner who has every intention of keeping up with their website but, when they’re being realistic, really doesn’t have the time for it. Because we work with ambitious, successful people, we see a lot of this. We all have lofty expectations of ourselves, and sometimes we fail to meet them.
Letting your site languish because you don’t have the time or interest to run updates and fix anything that breaks isn’t worth it. You never want to be in a situation where you have to restore your site from an outdated backup that’s missing your most recent content changes or, yikes, your store orders. Once you’ve gotten to the place where your site is broken and you’ve exhausted your own resources for fixing it, bringing in a professional to fix your site for you is going to be much more expensive than having someone take care of preventative maintenance on a monthly basis.
Do It Yourself or Have Someone Do It For You?
If you’re an intrepid explorer of technology, we’ll help you learn everything you need to know to take care of your website.
But if you’re focused on developing your own business and related skills, it’s important to work with an experienced web professional who will take care of website for you. Just like you could probably do your business’s taxes without an accountant, we hire accountants to do it for us because we know they’ll do a better job than we could ourselves.
If you’re interested in working with us for website maintenance, take a look at our care plans and get in touch.
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