The Problem
Like all technology, websites require regular maintenance to keep things working correctly. For example, your car. Would your car keep running if you neglected regular maintenance like changing the oil, batteries and tyres? Neglecting your website maintenance is the same. If website tune-ups are neglected, your website becomes buggy and vulnerable to hackers, dragging down its performance. Your website should be bug free and optimised for your audience. Presenting your business at its best. Regular website maintenance is essential for that to happen.
When was the last time you applied software updates to your website? Is your website software still up to date, secure and optimised to work correctly?
Today, we’ll discuss why website maintenance is essential for your business and mental health.
Myth #1: Websites are “Set and Forget”.
Many business owners neglect to check in on how their website is operating. You get busy or don’t think it’s a priority. But things can break if they’re not maintained. Outdated software leads to security risks and a buggy website that causes an awful user experience. Resulting in your audience losing trust and confidence in your brand and business. Or worse, your site goes down or gets hacked. Visitors will simply leave your website and look elsewhere.
In effect, you are giving potential leads to your competitors when you neglect to maintain and monitor your website.
How many are you losing every day?
Myth #2: I can just ‘auto update’ everything in WordPress.
There are many steps in doing proper website maintenance. WordPress version 5.5 introduced a feature that can automatically update WordPress Core, themes, and plugins. It sounds easy enough, 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 these updates to make their software compatible with the newly released WordPress Core version. So, blindly updating your website can cause bugs or your site to break completely. You need to be very careful when performing updates. Check online to see if others are having general issues first, and then go through each plugin and dependency in your site. Then, before applying the update, make sure you perform a full site backup. Finally, you can update the website. But then you’ll need to carefully go back through your site to double-check nothing broke when updating. If something did break, you’d need to roll back to the backup and begin the process all over again.
If that sounds like too much work, we’re glad to help you with your updates and maintenance.
The Benefits of Website Maintenance
Many business owners don’t realise how vital website maintenance is and the benefits they can enjoy when everything’s appropriately managed.
1. Peace of mind
Enjoy the peace of mind that comes from knowing your website is up to date, secure, optimised to run at its best and always live to serve your audience.
2. Get more leads
Your audience expects a bug free website. Give them that experience with our Website Maintenance. Keep your customers on your page, away from your competition.
3. Save more over time
Save money by doing regular tune-ups instead of letting minor issues become a big problem that is more costly for you and your business to fix. The average cyberattack costs a small business at least $38,000, but that cost can be avoided with routine care and maintenance.
Prevention is the Best Cure – Your 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, Book Clarity Call to learn which plan is right for your business.
