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Just like any software, websites require maintenance to keeping the site working properly. Avoiding website maintenance is like not having regular oil changes on your vehicle. You wouldn’t drive your car very long if you didn’t look after its maintenance, would you? Well, the same process is true for your website. Your website should always be live, ready for customers and presenting your business at its finest.

 

Websites Are Not a “Set and Forget”

If you don’t have website maintenance carried out monthly, you may actually be throwing money out the window. When visitors go to a website and find things wrong with it, they often don’t stick around. Many website owners never check their website to see how it’s functioning. Missed website issues or downtime can lose you potential customers.

 

The Benefits of Maintenance

Many people don’t realize the benefits of site maintenance:

The website performance, it’s load time, downtime and uptime, is all dependent on the WordPress software and plugin functioning as they should (and on the recent version).

The website growth, it’s fresh content, analytics monitoring and design changes, is all dependent on you having someone making sure all updates to the website are done in a smooth and error-free fashion.

 

Maintenance Workflow

At Zen Ideas, we take great care to first backup the website, and check the website after our updates for any issues. Our software keeps a record of plugins we update so if there is ever an issue we see what plugin version was changed and revert back. Also included in our monthly maintenance report are the performance and security scans. If in the event we ever catch a plugin issue, it becomes a support ticket and we address it before you ever know there’s a problem.

 

Dangers of Do It Yourself Maintenance

Maintaining your site yourself could cost you more than you may think. If you just update from your WordPress admin, you wouldn’t have a record of what was done. If an update to a plugin created an issue a couple weeks later, it would be difficult to know what changed and how you should revert back without restoring a very old backup.

 

It Costs More to Fix Than to Maintain

Inexperience and neglect can damage the look and functionality of your website. When that happens, you have a choice to make. One, you try and fix it yourself, in which case you may do further damage. Or two, you can then pay the (sometimes hefty) price for someone experienced to fix it. Just like your car, it costs more to fix it than it does to maintain it properly. Regular oil changes help keep your car running properly, regular site maintenance helps keeps your web site running properly.

 

If you’re interested in securing a maintenance contract for your web site, visit our care plan page to learn how we can keep your site in proper working order.

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