7 Reasons Why You Should Invest In Website Maintenance (And Why You Shouldn’t)
Most businesses assume that their responsibility ends with the creation and development of the website. Only a few realise that merely designing a website is not enough. A lot more needs to be done if you want your business to benefit from your site, like purchasing a website maintenance service package.
Just like getting a house built is not enough; getting a website designed is not enough either. If you want your house to remain in good condition, you need to maintain your website regularly yourself or purchase a website maintenance plan. Similar is the case with business websites. Regular maintenance is the key!
If you have chosen WordPress as your CMS, then there is no way you can hide away from regular website maintenance, without facing any negative consequences.
Six reasons why you should invest in website maintenance are:
Table of Contents
Why invest in website maintenance?
Your website is important for your business.
It wouldn’t be incorrect to say that your website is the face of your business. People who will visit your business website will judge your business according to the quality of your website. It helps tremendously in shaping your brand image.
If you visit a website and find it really hard to navigate through it, what would you do?
Obviously, you will exit that website and instead visit the website of a competing business that is easier to navigate.
Yes, that is how businesses end up losing potential customers if their business website has not been functioning properly!
When you are in the habit of regularly maintaining your business website, you can manage to avoid all these pitfalls. Once you manage to avoid all these possible pitfalls, your website is very likely to help your business grow.
We do realise that regularly engaging in WordPress website maintenance is not an easy task. Businesses simply do not have the time to do so. If you are in a similar scenario, do not worry!
WP Creative offers WordPress website support services in Sydney and all of Australia, which include regular website maintenance. To make things easier, you can hand over the task of website maintenance to us, and we assure you that our service won’t disappoint you!
Increase Brand Reputation and Revenue
The public image of your company is reflected on your website. A badly maintained website that has numerous errors, broken links, dead pages, and out-of-date content presents an unprofessional picture and will harm your brand’s reputation and revenue.
A WordPress maintenance plan will enable you to identify any errors as they happen. You may resolve issues and guarantee a positive user experience (UX) for your website visitors by routinely scanning your site for broken links, graphics, and page redirects.
Keep in mind that first impressions matter and that consumers today have short attention spans and form quick judgments about everything, including your website. Therefore, a WordPress maintenance plan will regularly review and update your website’s appearance and feel to match your brand and thereby boost your revenue.
Your website can help your business grow.
Websites are one of the most important media through which you can gain or lose customers. Your business website needs to keep customers engaged. Or else you might lose a lot of potential customers.
One way of doing so is by regularly maintaining and updating your website. If your website has the same content for years, then it is very likely that customers will lose interest. After all, who likes to read the same thing over and over again?
Of course, no one!
Hence, if you get into the habit of regularly maintaining your website, you can avoid the risk of losing customers. In fact, your conversion rate is likely to increase, and your customer base might widen. Resultantly, your business will grow by leaps and bounds.
That is why we highly recommend all our clients to get a website maintenance plan designed. After all, it is essential for your business growth!
Regular security updates and backups help keep your website safe and secure
You might have noticed that most website development platforms are open-source. This means that their coding is accessible to anyone and everyone around the world. The same is the case with WordPress. It is also an open-source website development forum.
Being an open-source forum has its own set of advantages as well as disadvantages. Such forums help in creating large communities. They also offer a number of plugins that can be used to augment the functionality of existing websites. However, the pitfall of these open-source web development forums is that they are more vulnerable to security breaches.
If your website is powered by WordPress, it is more vulnerable to hacking attacks. Therefore, it is in your business’s best interest to create multiple back-ups and regularly do security updates. This will help in preventing your website from hacking attacks.
Two of the most crucial aspects of website maintenance service are making sure that your website has daily backups running and updating themes and plugins frequently.
You can easily re-load a day-old backup of your website if you update a plugin and your site suddenly stops functioning. Backups are essential and save a tonne of money in the event that your website is hacked or if you unintentionally “damage” it when making an update.
These updates make sure that users see your themes as being faster and more responsive. Similarly to this, updating WordPress plugins adds improved functionalities that previously either had issues or weren’t accessible to users.
Regular maintenance adds value to your website
One of the reasons why we highly recommend investing in website maintenance is that it adds value to your business website. When your business website is regularly reviewed by an expert, the chances of figuring out the loopholes are higher. Once you get to know what is wrong with your website, you can fix it immediately.
Moreover, if an expert is reviewing your website, he/she will also keep on updating the graphics and the content. This will further improve the quality of your website and add value to it.
If you are looking forward to adding value to your website, feel free to reach out to us!
WordPress themes and plugins are constantly being updated
Technological tools are constantly evolving. They are on a journey towards improvement, and they are not stopping anytime soon. The same is the case with WordPress themes and plugins. Changes are being made in existing WordPress themes and plugins every now and then.
It is essential to keep your WordPress themes and plugins updated if you want to optimise your website performance. Only those websites that have optimised performance get a high search engine ranking. Hence, regularly updating your WordPress website also has utility for SEO.
Speed and performance optimisation is ensured when the website is regularly updated
When you are a WordPress website owner, your priority might be to generate revenue from the site as soon as possible. However, in order to do so, you need to make sure that every aspect of your website works perfectly well. And for that to happen, WordPress website maintenance is a must.
You risk losing crucial leads and site data from your website if your business updates crucial contact information or if a plugin develops a bug. Your competitor’s websites might get better over time and knock you down Google’s rankings.
Properly maintaining your site’s health ensures better performance and speed of your website. A better-performing website attracts more visitors which means more capital for your business.
In today’s fast-paced world, do you really think anyone has the time to waste on a website that doesn’t have an optimum speed?
Of course not!
No one has the time to waste on websites that have a slow speed. Visitors literally run away from websites that do not load fast enough. Especially when they have numerous other options available. According to a study, 40% of online shoppers will not wait longer than 3 minutes before exiting a website. This figure is huge and can mean a serious loss to a business that does not have a fast website speed.
If you wish to avoid any such loss, start regularly updating your WordPress website now!!!
Why You Shouldn’t Invest in WordPress Maintenance Packages?
While it’s great to learn that WordPress offers amazing tools to help you build and maintain a website. It is equally important to understand when is not the right time to invest in WordPress support or maintenance.
Your Website Doesn’t Add Any Financial Value to the Business
If your website isn’t making money for you, it’s not worth maintaining. Just because it’s technically possible to improve the look and functionality of your website doesn’t mean that you should invest in WordPress maintenance plans.
If the value of your site is only going to be derived from increasing traffic, then focus on SEO and marketing instead—those are much more effective ways to increase revenue.
You’re probably wondering, “But what about all the money I spend on hosting and maintaining my site?” Well, the answer is simple: you’re paying to host your site and maintain it. That’s it.
Your site isn’t adding any financial value because you’re paying to do something that doesn’t contribute anything to your bottom line (and if it does, it’s a tiny amount).
Your Website Isn’t a Part of Your Sales Cycle
You should not invest in WordPress maintenance if your business is not part of your sales cycle. Your website is not part of your sales cycle unless it is directly related to the sale you are trying to make. Even if it is, it’s best to wait until after you have closed the deal to begin focusing on the site maintenance.
If you’re a site owner that has a large audience and wants to grow that audience, then investing in maintenance will be very beneficial. However, if your website only has a few customers who visit regularly and buy from you regularly, then it may not be worth investing in WordPress maintenance as there won’t be many benefits for you.
Website is Not Mission Critical for the Business
When it comes to WordPress website maintenance, there are a lot of factors to take care of. Many businesses choose an option to go with the automated update option with the web hosting providers.
Sure, you can perform automatic backups and updates whenever possible. But If no one is testing if the website is functioning properly, your website can face a lot of complications in the future.
Many web developers fail to recognise the value of manual QA testing when creating websites. Testing can help you get the most out of your web development efforts and prevent expensive mistakes.
It enables you to create the best strategies against potential future bot and human errors. Thus, a lack of manual updates and QA testing is a considerable reason why WordPress maintenance isn’t something you should carry on with if your service provider doesn’t offer you the feature.
Lack of Budget for Website Maintenance
Your website needs constant updates and regular maintenance. it maintains the health of your WordPress website and helps it run smoothly with better and optimised performance. And without it, your website is likely to go lifeless.
Thus, to save your WordPress site from getting out of order, you go ahead and get yourself website maintenance and support service. You might think that this is where all your trouble ends, however, the truth is, this is where all your trouble begins.
There are hundreds of WordPress website maintenance and support services available all over the world. And they all advertise their service as the best one in the market. However, one major drawback is the price tag they all come with.
Almost all maintenance service providers charge on a monthly basis. And the monthly cost can go up to hundreds of dollars depending on the type of business and website you own. It might be affordable for big firms and organisations but when it comes to small businesses or personal blogs and websites, the prices can be too high.
You Want to Set and Forget Your Website
If you’re not thinking to invest in routine maintenance or looking for one-off updates, that’s not going to work. Once you’ve decided to appoint a full-time website maintenance and support server, you should know that it isn’t a one-time thing. Your website needs updates and maintenance every once in a while.
This means when you’re making a proper maintenance plan and investing your money, you can’t back out after just one use. In fact, you’ll have to do frequent updating, probably monthly basis if not weekly.
You are Not Getting a Reliable Support
There are plenty of WordPress website maintenance and support service providers available in the market. However, the problem with most of them is their own support system. Many of these service providers don’t provide 24/7 support (which is crucial when you have a website) but their prices are still sky-high.
You don’t get Phone and Video Support
Another major drawback of some of the most renowned WordPress website maintenance and support service providers is their lack of phone support. While some do have it, that too becomes limited most of the time.
Additionally, a number of service providers do not even provide video tutorials and how-to training to their customers, especially brand-new site owners. This can leave them more delusional and helpless even before starting their business.
No Initial Website Performance Audit
As mentioned above, purchasing a WordPress maintenance plan can cost you a lot of money. And with the added charges of the service provider, the fees can go up to hundreds of dollars. Additionally, the services these companies provide are mostly targeted towards large businesses and huge firms that can afford to pay these prices. However, these services do not really cater to small businesses with limited budgets.
If you are interested to learn more, please read our WordPress Maintenance guide (Everything you need to know about WordPress Website Maintenance).
Conclusion
You’re probably here because you are a WordPress website owner or marketer who is looking around for valid reasons not to spend any money but you still need website maintenance to keep your website up-to-date and running.
While it’s tempting to skip the process and just pay only when something breaks down, there are plenty of situations that can cost you a decent amount of money without warning and without reason.
Whenever a business has to invest in something, the first question that arises is, “Is this investment worth making?”
We can only answer this question for website maintenance. It is certainly worth investing in website maintenance. Every penny spent on website maintenance is worth spending. Hence, do not overthink it and get your web maintenance plan designed today.
Our experts at WP Creative have been in the practice of designing a web maintenance plan for our clients for years. We provide a number of website support and maintenance services, and website maintenance is one of them.
Our website maintenance services include:
- Monthly updates of WordPress core, themes, and plugins.
- Phone and email support.
- Security check and monitor performance from time to time.
- Monitoring your website’s functionality to ensure that everything is working.
- Scheduled off-site backups (stored for 30 days).
- Spam filtering and cleansing.
- Database optimisation.
- Find and fix 404 errors and broken links.
- Help with support tasks such as quick fixes, change requests, content updates, improve performance, etc.
If you wish to avail any of these services, see our WordPress website maintenance packages or get in touch with our representative for more details!
