We all know how important it is to take our cars for a service. If you don’t, eventually the the car will slow down, seize up and potentially stop functioning altogether. But did you know that WordPress websites are exactly the same?
WordPress website maintenance keeps your site secure, running smoothly and loading fast, which ultimately helps maintain your rankings on Google.
Why? Because ongoing maintenance improves user experience, site performance and crawlability. These are all are key ranking factors on Google.
We see it time and time again where a business will invest a lot of time and money in a new website, SEO and content but fail to keep their website up to date. This means your WordPress website will progressively slow down and will become exposed to spam and bugs if the security and speed are not maintained regularly.
Stay Virus-Free!
Site speed and security are critical to a website’s performance and user experience, which means keeping plugins updated and removing outdated or defunct ones.
A Georgia Institute of Technology study has found that over 25,000 WordPress websites are currently infected by malicious or compromised plugins. This can cause a whole host of issues that arise from plugins not being maintained, including data hacking, malware and crypto-jacking to ransomware and website malfunctions.
“Plugins should be thoroughly vetted and tested by experienced developers and security teams before being utilised in a production environment”, notes Senior Cybersecurity Consultant from NVISIUM, Cory Cline.
Creating a WordPress website isn’t a set-and-forget process, which is why to stay virus-free and keep your site and code clean, regular web maintenance is a must.
Don’t DIY WordPress Web Maintenance!
We cannot stress enough the importance of having a professional manage your web maintenance. You would be shocked to see how many times business owners, unqualified marketers and even IT Professionals (yep, them too) attempt it themselves, and fail. This can hurt the back pocket when you subsequently need to have a professional fix it, or worse, need to completely redo something on the site that was broken.
When conducting web maintenance and upgrading plugins, our developers at 80/20 ALWAYS test these in a staging environment before deploying it on the live site. This provides an opportunity to check everything works as it should and scan for any bugs.
Premium Protection for Premium Performance
In addition to having a professional web developer manage your WordPress website maintenance, it’s important to have the right security tools in place too. We recommend Wordfence Premium to all of our clients as it doesn’t slow the site speed down and does a great job at detecting any threats that may be active on the site or attempting to access the site. Securi is another excellent security tool but in tests, we’ve found that it slows a site down more than Wordfence Premium. Neither are infallible, by the way, but they are both as good as it gets for WordPress Security.
To help you stay on top of your web maintenance, we offer a dedicated monthly website maintenance package to keep your website in top shape and converting well.
Get in touch with the team at 80/20 Digital today on 0400 677 202 and see how our WordPress website maintenance can keep your site in tip-top shape.
