Why it’s Important to Maintain Your Website

by Tina Walker | Jun 19, 2014 | Featured, Training, Wordpress Maintenance

I’m not going to pretend like maintaining your WordPress website is fun, it’s just like any other chore, it’s work and can often be the last thing you want to do. But, it really is extremely important because if you don’t ; it’s possible you will come up with something like the image in this article.

The potential that your website could be hacked is only one of the potential risks of not maintaining your WordPress site. Here is a small list of items that maintenance assists with:

• Slow Website: WordPress websites run off a platform called PHP. In order for WordPress to run, the server that it is hosted on also must run PHP. As new versions of PHP come out, eventually older versions are phased out.Server’s upgrade to the newest version and remove older versions. If you don’t keep up on your maintenance – your PHP version may not run on your server anymore. This could cause considerable down time while updates are performed and in some cases I have found that the clients theme no longer is maintained and it takes considerable time to get the site back up and looking great again.

• Hijacked Website: It is sad, but there are people, even companies out there that search for sites that they can find a security breach in, through a plug-in not updated or through a theme that someone found an open door in. They hide scripts within the file structure that they have made access into. You don’t see the script by looking at the website, but behind the scenes they are sending emails out using your IP address. Eventually you’re hosting company or google see’s massive traffic. Your email addresses can be blacklisted, your site can be marked as a warning by google not to visit the site, and you can lose a lot of visitors while the issue is worked out and the scripts are found. Typically this is at minimal at 72 hour downtime, sometimes more.

• Broken Website Functionality: Your host makes a server upgrade, you notice that your contact form has been a little slow, or actually maybe more than a little slow. You go review your contact form only to see an error after submitting! You go back to your host or your web developer and find out that because of the server upgrade, your contact form hasn’t worked for two weeks. How many clients could you potentially lose in two weeks?

• Data Loss: WordPress websites run off of a database. I have reviewed many hosting plans, many offer backups, but in the small print, it tells you that you are the responsible party for your data. They cannot and will not guarantee that a backup is in existence and sometimes that back-up might be weeks or months old. Think about the work that has been done on your website in the last 30 days. How many man hours would it take to reproduce the work if the only backup available was 30 days old? Even worse, what if the backup didn’t exist?

These are just a few of the items that website maintained can prevent! Your maintenance list can be divided out into Daily, Weekly and Monthly Checklists to make it easier. Smart to Finish also offers maintenance programs for you, just let us know if you would like to be added to our maintenance calendar.

In my next article we will discuss the daily, weekly, and monthly checklist along with important preparation steps. If your site has not had maintenance performed, please consider it now. The benefits could save you hours of headaches and once your site is updated to the latest versions, maintenance could take as little as 10 minutes per week.