Maintaining a website is an important thing to take into consideration for any website owner. Unfortunately, it is not a case of just building a website, you also need to make sure your website is kept up to date and secure, as well as performing various other maintenance related tasks.
The Dangers of Not Maintaining a Website
Not maintaining a website could potentially have disastrous consequences for your business. Without implementing a good maintenance plan, you are at risk of your website becoming out of date and vulnerable to security attacks. Systems such as WordPress are a target for hackers, so when a security hole is found, a fix is made. When this fix is made, an update is pushed to every site running WordPress. If these updates are not applied, you are going to be running a website with KNOWN security holes. Basically, running a website with outdated technology, such as an old version of WordPress, is like leaving the door of your website wide open to hackers.
Usability is another thing to think about when it comes to maintaining a website. If your website is out of date, all sorts of issues can occur. Forms may randomly stop working, notifications begin to malfunction, important parts of the website may go offline for various reasons. As the internet evolves, so do the tools that are used to power it, and if we are not using the most up to date tool, we start to have issues and things start to go wrong.
What Does Maintaining a Website involve?
Maintaining a website, particularly one running on WordPress, involves various activities. It is important to run any updates that get sent through to WordPress, as well as any plugins and theme updates. If you are using Genesis, this also needs updating whenever there is an update available. It is also important to test the entire website to make sure everything still works as expected after an update has been applied. It is vital for any website to also have a website backup solution in place, preferably daily backups, just in case anything goes wrong, either from an update or from something else.
Keep an Eye on Your Plugins
It is also important to regularly perform what I call, an internal plugin audit. There are a lot of dedicated plugin developers, who put an incredible amount of time and effort into their products. However due to the nature of the WordPress repository, there are also many developers who lose interest in a plugin they have built, abandon development and support and move onto other projects. If this happens to a plugin author that has written a plugin that your website is dependant on, then this plugin is not being tested with new versions of WordPress which will lead to issues down the line.
Wrap Up
As nice as it would be to just let your website run itself, a regular website maintenance routine is absolutely key for running any successful website. If you are already maintaining your website, that’s great, kudos 🙂 If you’re not maintaining your website, and don’t want the extra hassle and responsibilities that come with website maintenance, I offer 2 different website maintenance plans and would be more than happy to help.
I hope you have found this article useful and interesting. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask in the comment section below.
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