Website maintenance was never a big thing in the past. You’d build a website, and not touch it for a long time and it would just work. But now with the constantly changing world of the Internet, website maintenance is a critical part of owning a website. CMS platforms like WordPress (which powers over 50% of websites in the word), is constantly updating their security and platform on a monthly basis, sometimes even more. This means as website owner, you have to make sure all of your core WP database files, themes, plugins, third party integrations (contact forms, scheduling software, etc…) are all updated on a monthly basis, otherwise your website can go down or not function properly.

In fact, not caring for your website every month will actually cost you more money in the long run. For example, if you have potential customers visiting your website and it wasn’t functioning properly (links not working, pages not loading, contact forms erroring out), there is a slim chance they’ll stick around. Or worse, imagine your site was down or not loading at all. With 82% of consumers in the U.S. reporting that they will visit a company’s website BEFORE making a purchasing decision, those kinds of missed issues or downtime can cause lose you business.

In addition to that, if your website were to go down or get hacked and you didn’t have a backup (which is something a monthly maintenance plan takes care of), then you would have to rebuild your site from scratch, which you will have to pay for. So in most cases, it will actually cost you more to not maintain your website every month.

Here is a list of things that need to be done on a monthly basis to keep your website up and secure:

– Core WP Version Updates
– Bug Fixes
– Security Scans & Patches
– Third-party Integrations
– Plugin Updates
– Development Modifications
– Content Updates
– Database Updates
– Ongoing Edits as needed
– Backups (most important)

There are more than that, but those are the most important.

Why You Shouldn’t Try To Do It Yourself

Updating your website is not easy. First and foremost, if you are not running daily backups, and one of the updates caused your site to go down, you would lose your entire website & data. That’s why running backups is the most important thing. Between WP core files, plugins, or third party software, there are many different things that run your site and that you have to update. It’s important to do them in a specific order so if any of the updates break the website, you know which one it was. In this case you just load your backup so the site’s back up instantly, and then you can see why the update broke the site.

So sometimes an update to one thing can cause another to break, and if you are doing this yourself and don’t know how to fix it, you’ll most likely have to hire someone on an hourly basis, which can be very costly. In addition, if an update broke your site and you didn’t have a backup, you could potentially lose content changes, recent design updates, orders, new contacts, and the list goes on.

Updating your site and all it’s core components every month is not as easy as just clicking a button so taking this approach can not only cause further damage but as I mentioned, can end up costing you in the long run. This is just one reason why it’s actually cheaper to have someone who’s experienced maintain your website for you.

This is why we don’t even offer one-time website pricing and only offer monthly pricing. Because we know that if we just built you a new website and handed it off to you, it won’t last very long with out being cared for and we wouldn’t feel right about charging a company for a new website knowing that if it wasn’t maintained it wouldn’t last long.

By having a trusted partner maintain your website for you, it will save you time (and frustration) of trying to do it yourself, be cheaper than having to hire someone to fix it or build you a new one in the event it goes down, and save you from potentially losing new customers who would leave your website if it was broke or down.