A WordPress website maintenance plan is like a service of changing the oil in your car. Changing your oil is not just a suggestion, it’s a requirement if you want your car to work. For your website and your business, it is necessary to make sure your site stays functional and performing well.

This is often forgotten or ignored but once you experience a major problem with your website – you know how important it is to keep things maintained.

Security

Security is arguably the most important reason why you should keep your WordPress website up to date. Due to it’s immense popularity, WordPress is a popular target for hackers and data thieves. Since WordPress is open source, anyone can study the source code to learn and improve it. However it also means that hackers can study it too and find ways to break into websites.

To make sure everything is covered, radiantWEB offers a two phased approach at security:
1) OWASP method of security – aims for a unified approach on WordPress security design and implementation. It is definitely more than a checklist, it’s a guide for secure implementation and an invitation to consider and to analyse each individual case.

2) Website Application Firewall (WAF) – This entails checking theme’s, plugins and WordPress itself for any known vulnerabilities, and ensuring it is brought to our attention.

Speed

For the everyday WordPress user, this can quickly turn into a nightmare when their site starts to bottleneck and they don’t know why or even where to start troubleshooting and more so – visitors won’t wait for your website to load. If something is not working as they want it to, they’ll go away. And worse, many of them won’t ever come back.

Website load speed has a direct impact on SEO performance and therefore business growth and it can be measured, especially when you have a high number of unique visitors using your site.

Updates

User-experience is essentially treating your visitors well – and technical problems can always occur such as certain elements glitching – from a mouse scroll to something that should work which stopped working without your knowledge.

Your visitors could encounter many other various unexplained frustrations with your website. And you may never know about these problems until diminishing traffic sends up a red flag. 

WordPress, theme and plugin updates are continually solving user issues, improving security and adding newer technology. And by keeping current, you can preempt many technical issues before they become a problem.

Backups

The database, files and images (everything that comes together to create your website). We’ve got a copy of your website safe, secure and ready to be reinstated at the click of a button.

Better Pricing

When you purchase a maintenance package for your website, you will qualify for a lower hourly rate. Similar to buying in bulk, when you subscribe for one of our maintenance packages you save money.

Search Engines

Website maintenance is critical to search-engine rankings. Websites with old content rank lower in search engine listings. Some search engines, including Google, check your page’s “if-modified-since” HTTP header to determine whether it is worth crawling. Failing to make frequent modifications could cause you to be pushed below active competitors in the listings and cost you business over time.

Long Term Cost Savings

If you keep your site maintained and updated regularly, there’s less chance of something major going wrong that will cost a lot of money to make right. You have to weigh the pros and cons. A monthly sum to make sure your site is secure and working properly, versus the possibility and cost of a complete site rebuild in a worst case scenario.

Reporting

To keep up with all the different parts of your website can be time consuming – so we provide you a monthly report showing all the crucial & informative statistics from your site so you know exactly how your site is performing.  All aspects of our service, along with Google Analytics and SEO effectiveness are rolled up into a neat and easy to consume report.

So What Is The Bottom Line?

Small or Big website – You need a WordPress website maintenance plan. The longer you wait to update to the next version of WordPress, the more you put your site at risk to be exploited by hackers or experience significant issues or bugs if your site is multiple versions behind the latest release.