For businesses who want to take their online presence seriously, building a website can be an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. Still, if the website is integral to your business’s ability to turn a profit, you can easily justify the expense as an investment. But you shouldn’t stop there, because the work on your website is never really done. Websites don’t take care of themselves, on their own. You have to monitor, look at it, and from time to time, tweak or change it. If you don’t do this, your website’s performance will degrade with time. Performance degradation might even be the least of your worries if you just let your website be.
You need to take your website maintenance seriously. The more your business needs a website, the more important it becomes to have dedicated professionals look after its wellbeing. To further illustrate why your website needs regular maintenance, let’s look through the most common website maintenance tasks.
Framework Updates
If your website is built and hosted services that offer a website builder such as Squarespace, you have nothing to worry about. These services might offer limited customizability options. At the very least they’ll make sure their own software is kept up to date.
But if you’re using regular hosting to host a WordPress website, things are a bit different. WordPress is an incredibly popular website framework for many reasons. One of them is because WordPress is serious about safety and security, which only adds to the already busy update calendar.
WordPress will release updates several times a year, maybe even every other month. Failing to install these updates can have dire consequences for the functioning of your website. As well as the safety and security of your customers. The hosting service won’t update your website’s framework for you, and it won’t happen on its own.
Plugin and Extension Updates
Plugins and extensions can greatly increase the usability and performance of your website. Plugins can be so useful. You might find it hard to stop installing a reasonable number of them. Every new one adds a cool or useful feature. The only problem is that too many plugins can have the opposite effect on your website. Dragging its performance down instead of improving it.
But even if you carefully choose and optimize the plugins and extensions for your website. You can’t just set everything up and leave it forever. Plugins and extensions are pieces of software, and as such, they will get updates. You’ll have to install these updates, and then you’ll need to make sure that they didn’t change the plugins in a way that makes them less useful to you.
Plugins and extensions often serve as a backdoor to malware and virus infections. Keeping them up to date, and uninstalling the ones that are no longer supported, is one of the most basic measures you can take to keep your website and its visitors safe.
Benefits of Contracting Regular Maintenance
Between the framework and the plugins, you would have plenty of work in your hands with keeping your website updated and well-maintained. And these are just the most obvious and immediate areas that require regular maintenance – everything from content website links needs to be checked and updated regularly.
The best way to save time and, ultimately, money on website maintenance, is to contract it out to professional maintenance service providers. Even if you have the know-how to do it on your own, you’d still need the time not only to do it, but also to stay on top of all the new developments in website design, hosting, software, and security.
You maintain your website so that you can have peace of mind knowing that it works well. The only way to have that peace of mind, however, is to have professionals take care of the website for you. Every other option is simply not as good.
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