If you don’t maintain your website, you compromise its functionalities, security, and user experience. And, that’s not good for business. The good thing is that WordPress comes with various maintenance plans that can automate all these processes. This allows you to focus on other important aspects of your WordPress website.
WordPress Websites
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WordPress is the most popular content management system out there. 30 percent of all websites in the world run on WordPress.
The reason for its popularity is that it’s a robust Content Management system, powerful website builder, has a user-friendly interface, has a free version, is easy to customize with plugins and themes, is SEO friendly, and is highly flexible.
But, even with all these features and functionalities, you need to maintain it regularly to keep it secure and healthy, encourage ongoing traffic growth, and fortify your SEO and search engine rankings.
The good thing is that WordPress comes with smart maintenance tools to help keep your website secure and healthy.
However, because a WordPress website requires ongoing maintenance and frequent updates once it’s set up, it can be overwhelming to do it yourself.
That’s why most WordPress website owners outsource these services to WordPress maintenance service providers.
What are WordPress maintenance plans?
Many people think that once they’ve built their WordPress websites, the only task left is creating content, posting on it, and managing it.
They don’t know that maintaining the site is a critical part of running a successful WordPress website. Like automobiles, websites need regular maintenance to run properly.
Here are the benefits of maintaining your WordPress website regularly;
Security
Security is the main reason why website maintenance is critical. Many website owners think that once they’ve built their websites on WordPress, they’ve guaranteed its security. Hackers are always on the lookout for vulnerabilities and can still breach your website whether you built it on WordPress or not.
The common victims of hacks are old or un-updated websites.
When hackers breach your website, they can steal your private information, as well as that of your site visitors like phone numbers, credit card numbers, physical addresses, and passwords, especially, if you’re running an e-commerce website.
They can use this information to steal your identity or empty your bank account or other financial accounts. Maintaining your website regularly ensures it keeps up with the content management system’s software patches and security updates.
Reputation
If you’re running an e-commerce website, it means customers are using their financial details to pay for products or services they’re buying.
A single incident of loss of a customer’s financial details through a hack is enough to ruin the reputation of your business. In fact, customers will not want to log into your site as they fear the same may happen to them.
Regular maintenance of your website will keep hackers at bay and protect the reputation of your business.
Speed
Today’s consumers want to log into a website, buy what they want, and leave as quickly as possible. If your website doesn’t offer that kind of experience, customers will abandon it and find one that offers it.
This means a loss of conversion and sales for your business.
A site that hasn’t been maintained for a long time is typically slower. Maintaining your website ensures your pages load quickly and this enhances customer experience.
New features
Maintaining your website helps you access new features and functionalities that boost its performance.
Website maintenance is the process of monitoring your site to detect issues and mistakes and keep it updated and relevant.
It should be carried out consistently to keep your site healthy, ensure uninterrupted inflow and growth of traffic, fortify your SEO, and increase your search engine rankings.
Therefore, WordPress maintenance plans are packaged services that ensure the security and optimal performance of your website.
Who should have WordPress maintenance plans?
You need WordPress maintenance plans if;
- You’re a beginner WordPress website owner, and you have no idea how to back up your database and files are afraid of losing them to hackers and scammers.
- You’re looking to regularly update your blog and its content but you don’t have the time
- You want to fortify the security of your WordPress website but you lack the time to commit to it
- Your WordPress website has numerous plugins
- You’ve undergone training on how to use WordPress but you have no idea what those red ‘’update’’ icons mean.
- You lack knowledge of maintaining your website yourself or simply don’t have an interest in doing it.
- You don’t want (or lack time) to manage or monitor your domains or accounts.
- You run multiple e-commerce websites
WordPress Maintenance Plan Features
Website Updates
WordPress maintenance plans come with multiple update capabilities, such as core WordPress updates, plugin updates, and theme updates.
These updates are designed to secure your WordPress website, fix bugs, keep up-to-date with new features and technology, and enhance its speed.
Updates also help you identify and delete old plugins and those that you no longer use to free up space and reduce the vulnerability of your website.
WordPress Website Backups
WordPress comes with two main backups; File backups and database backups. File backups consist of core installation files, themes, and plugins, while database backups comprise users, posts, comments, and more. A solid WordPress backup plan combines the two.
It’s a good idea to create numerous backups and save them in at least 3 varied locations in case 1 is corrupted.
The best places to save your backups include your computer, cloud, or your external hard disc drive.
The security of your WordPress website depends on how often you back up your files and databases, but experts recommend backing them up automatically on a daily basis to guarantee its security.
Security Scanning
WordPress maintenance plans also include security functions.
The functions aim to monitor and secure your website. While WordPress is generally secure, it’s not susceptible to malware.
Specifically, this task involves scanning your website to detect the presence of malware, get rid of it, and harden your site’s security.
Most WordPress Maintenance service providers know that security maintenance can affect your website servers, which is why they schedule it during low traffic times.
Besides scanning, security maintenance tasks involve inspecting your site’s error and access logs to determine if there’s any unusual or suspicious activity.
The providers of security maintenance services advise website owners to create strong passwords and change them regularly to prevent security breaches.
However, good providers offer inbuilt security scanning to alleviate the hassle of manual security scans.
Deleting Redundant Files
If you’re running a website, you know that piled-up data eats up your system memory.
You need to delete your data and files, such as drafts, unused media files, old content, trash, and revisions from time to time to prevent that from happening.
You should also delete all spam content because they consume space on your website and destroy its reputation.
Most WordPress maintenance plans come with tools like Antispam Bee, Akismet, and CleanTalk to automatically ward off spam comments on your website.
Deleting redundant data and files helps make your dashboard clutter-free and reduces the load on your site.
Enhance Performance
Google loves fast-loading websites. And because load-time is a Google ranking factor, websites that load quickly get higher search engine rankings.
The ideal website load time, according to Google, is 2 seconds.
Anything higher than that can lead to a bad user experience and increase your website’s bounce rate.
Most WordPress maintenance plans come with tools like GTmetrics, PageSpeed Insights, and Google Search Console to help you test out the speed of your website.
Ensure Proper Functioning
One of the functions offered by WordPress maintenance plans is ensuring your website runs properly. Aspects that providers check to ensure that include:
Pages: Ensures all pages on your website are working properly and none is displaying the 404 error.
Links: Ensures that all internal links still work and don’t have formatting and spelling errors.
Forms: Ensure forms are okay and deliver emails.
Analytics: Most WordPress maintenance plans come with analytics tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Ahrefs to give you an analysis of the performance of your website.
The best WordPress Maintenance Service providers
WP Engine
Founded in 2010 and headquartered in Austin, Texas, WP Engine is a privately held company that specializes in Managed WordPress Hosting, WordPress digital experience, and WordPress technology.
Besides those, the company undertakes WordPress maintenance and support functions, such as updating plugins, updating WordPress core, updating and maintaining themes, and backing up databases, and files.
Godaddy WordPress Premium Support
Godaddy, founded in 1997, is the largest and most popular web hosting and domain name registration provider out there.
They’ve been rigorously pursuing the WordPress market over the past few years. They have a solid and consistent presence at WordPress WordCamp conferences.
They use their WordPress.org profile to present the numerous WordPress plugins and themes they have released.
All their security maintenance plans (Essential, Deluxe, Ultimate, and Express) include SSL certificates, advanced security monitoring, unlimited malware removal, and hack repair, advanced DDoS mitigation, advanced protection, speed boost, and automated backup and one-click restore.
FlyWheel
FlyWheel is a managed WordPress web hosting provider founded by Dusty Davidson, Tony Noecker, and Rick Knudtson.
Besides offering web hosting services, it provides maintenance services to WordPress websites, which is included in all of its hosting plans (Tiny, Starter, Freelance, and Agency).
Examples of maintenance services it offers include automatic
WordPress plugin updates and automatic backups, content delivery network integration, SSL support, and security services like free malware clean up, automatic nightly backups, data encryption, communication encryption, standard hardware and software updates, and two-factor authentication.
Bluehost
Bluehost is one of the most popular web hosting providers out there. It specializes in web hosting and domain name registration services.
You can install your WordPress website on Bluehost manually or through a quick install.
Its unique partnership with WordPress makes it a great platform to build your WordPress website.
Besides offering web hosting and domain registration services, Bluehost offers maintenance services to WordPress websites, thanks to its new feature called WP pro.
Besides helping you build a professional WordPress website, WP Pro offers multiple, smart automatic WordPress maintenance services, such as jet pack, daily scheduled backups, plugin and theme updates, malware detection and removal, and domain privacy and protection.
All these maintenance services are included in every hosting plan (Build, Grow and Scale plans).
Jetpack allows you to access tools like website data backup, malware protection, and website analytics. All these maintenance features are automated and this allows you to focus on other aspects of your WordPress website.
Maintaining your website is not an easy task. But, when done right, it will help keep your website secure and healthy. If you don’t maintain your website, you compromise its functionalities, security, and user experience.
And, that’s not good for business. The good thing is that WordPress comes with various maintenance plans that can automate all these processes.
This allows you to focus on other important aspects of your WordPress website.
