Why You Should Invest in a WordPress Care Plan
Everyone hates paying for insurance but if something happens, they wish they had it.
Website Care Plans are similar to taking care of your house. Think of it like Home Improvement. Sometimes your house needs a new roof (or appliances, or flooring, or you go all out, and put in a pool!). Not only does Home Improvement spiff up your house but it adds value too.
Your website needs maintenance, too, to keep it spiffy looking (fresh) and valuable (safe and secured). Avoiding putting in the time and money for home improvement maintenance may leave you upside down when you go to sell that house someday. The same can happen with your website; the ‘upside down’ is your site goes down or gets hacked and you don’t have a plan in place to get it restored. When you don’t keep up with the frequent updates to both your theme and its plugins, your website becomes vulnerable, and the odds are increased that your website becomes a victim to hackers and malware. At best, not keeping up with updates may start to break down some areas of your site, just like that leaky roof.
The days of having someone build you a website, and you think ‘Great, I’m done!’ Are Over
It used to be that once a business owner had someone create a website for them, they thought they were done, that the website would last an indefinite time. But that’s not the case any longer. Your website viewers, visitors and buyers want and expect to see fresh content from time to time. You need to spend some time keeping it fresh. If you just ignore it, never updating either the content or the software, you will lose visitors. Worse than that, your site’s functionality will eventually break down. A website that isn’t working is a website that visitors “bounce” away from. Many website owners don’t review their websites to see how they are performing. Even if you aren’t checking your analytics, I guarantee Google is, and that means your site will keep slipping down the ranks. Google rewards sites with fresh content with higher ranking, and penalize those that don’t.
Website Maintenance is a good insurance policy
You know what they say about insurance. Everyone hates paying for insurance but if something happens, they wish they had it. There are far-reaching ramifications to not taking your website’s performance seriously. Your website overall performance, the time it takes to load, hosting downtime and up-time, depends on how well the WordPress software, themes and installed plugins are performing. And, if they aren’t the most recent versions, there could be holes in your website security.
A website’s growth, new content, SEO monitoring and design changes, all benefit from having someone make sure that updates to the website are done in a timely, technically efficient and routine manner.
KMS Care Plans Maintenance Process
Kerri Marvel Services takes great care to monitor your website, and watch for any brewing issues. Backups are done every day, and kept for a rolling three months, offsite. I also use a trusted system to keep a record of all updates so if there is ever an issue we see what was changed and can restore a website to an earlier time. Included in every KMS monthly maintenance plan are security scans and web optimization.
The dangers of Do-It-Yourself Maintenance
Maintaining your website on your own can be done, but why would you want to? Do you have the time for the learning curve part of it? In the end, fixing a problem could cost you more than you may think. Often a client will believe they were creating backups only to find out they weren’t actually working. If you have a backup, you have to know how to properly restore it. This might involve FTP (file transfer protocol) and other techniques only a professional should do. If you didn’t notice your site was hacked, you might not have a backup that goes back far enough in history to find a clean version and Google or other entities may mark your website as “may be compromised”, or even “blacklisted”. Sometimes a plugin can go too long without an update and cause a php (program language) error when you do update it. If you have your site on autopilot for updates, you won’t have a complete record of when an update occurred. I could go on and on here. But I won’t. For those who insist on DIY maintenance, I invite you to review what needs to be done.
In the long run, maintaining your website will cost less than having to rebuild it
Lack of experience with updates and neglect can damage the look and functionality of your website. When that occurs, you have a choice to make. First, you can try to fix it yourself. This will most likely require a lot of research and maybe some coding or FTP (file transfer protocol). Or two, you can then pay the cost for someone experienced to fix it. Just like having the plumber come in when you messed up the pipes, it will definitely cost more to fix after it’s completely broken down than it would have cost you to have maintained it properly over time..
Rely on the one with the Experience
Why not deal with what you know best and let KMS deal with what she knows best? Would you try to retrofit the fuse panel box of your house on your own without a professional electrician? Then why try to maintain your own website if you’re not a web professional? By hiring me to update and maintain your website properly, you are actually protecting your investment and taking the worry away from your already busy job of running your business.
Visit my WordPress Website Care Plans page for details of what’s included in a KMS WordPress website care plan. Or, visit the KMS Care Plan FAQ page here.
Have a question or concern you think may not be covered in any of the above? Click here to contact me with questions.
