Why should you engage a WordPress website maintenance service provider?
Whether your priority is keeping your website and business information secure, avoiding the costs and disruption of downtime, updating content, or just having someone to turn to for any questions, an ongoing website maintenance service is the solution.
What sort of website maintenance service is needed?
Maintenance for a WordPress website is similar to any other form of maintenance in your life, such as servicing your car or repairing your home. Software changes so quickly, and hackers are looking for any weakness to exploit your website, so it’s paramount that you keep everything up to date and secure.
With our website maintenance services, which we call Website Care, we carry out important tasks almost every day for every site we’re managing. It doesn’t matter how big or small the site is, what type of features it has, or whether it’s new or well established – there are always critically important maintenance tasks to do.
Paying for professional website maintenance might sound like a luxury and one that you can cut out of a tight budget. However, the reality of today’s world is that not having reliable and ongoing maintenance can end up costing significantly more in the long run and leave you and your website exposed to a number of risks, including:
- Cyber attacks: More than 30,000 websites are hacked every single day. Daily maintenance services include monitoring of your website 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. With high-end security measures in place, you can enjoy peace of mind knowing the risk of cyberattack is significantly reduced.
- Software issues: Faulty plugins, outdated software and increasingly sophisticated hacking attempts all require your website to be upgraded at least every week. Without the expertise, time, and energy to do this yourself, you’re better off turning to a professional team who can do it on your behalf.
- Extended downtime: When a website goes down, whether through its own fault or due to external factors, it can take longer to carry out health checks, diagnose issues and provide the appropriate fix to get back up and running without a team of professionals behind you. The longer your website is down, the more direct revenue you stand to lose, the worse it is for your brand and customer/client experience, and the harder it can be to assess and reverse the damage. WordPress website maintenance service providers ensure they are available for urgent support when things go wrong.
- Less traffic/sales: Even if nothing drastic happens – no cyber attacks and no software malfunctions – without ongoing maintenance your website will slowly become less responsive, less dynamic and less user-friendly. This is going to result in less website traffic and a lower rate of sales conversions for those who do venture onto your site. Maintenance services keep everything running at its best.
WordPress Website Maintenance: Why prevention is better than a cure
One of the most common objections to ongoing WordPress website maintenance services is that you can engage a web developer if/when your website needs it. However, waiting until your website is already glitchy or broken, or for your customers’ data to be compromised is not a good idea… to put it mildly.
Fixing a broken or hacked website is more difficult, which translates into more labour time and a far greater cost. Ad hoc support services can therefore cause unnecessary delays, be costly, and be less effective in the long run.
Many different behind-the-scenes actions go into a website care plan. Without it, your website might seem fine, while on the backend everything is unravelling. Or the other way around.
Preventing problems before they happen is the best way to keep your website running as it should. We often say that when it comes to our website maintenance services, the less you notice us doing the better. It means we’re doing our job well. Of course, we also make sure you’re aware of what’s happening with your website at all times, which is why we not only communicate frequently but also provide comprehensive maintenance reports.
Why hire professionals when you can do it yourself?
The work of professional website maintenance providers, such as ourselves, speaks for itself. Many people believe they can handle the necessary ongoing maintenance themselves, but there’s a lot that goes into maintaining a website, and it all takes valuable time.
Without an experienced, expert team to back you up, you could find yourself in hot water with any one or more of the following issues:
- No data backups in case of a crash or cyber attack.
- Spending more on website software licences.
- Using free software use which can be limited, deficient, or unsafe.
- Lacking time or resources to conduct the maintenance yourself.
- Greater overheads by fixing problems in a piecemeal approach.
- Losing website traffic or customers without realising there is a user experience problem.
- Having to spend more money fixing the problem rather than preventing it.
Like having your car serviced, your house treated for pests, or your illness checked by a doctor, prevention of WordPress website problems is always better – not to mention faster, easier, and cheaper – than an ad hoc cure.
Evaluating website maintenance service costs
Many businesses are understandably price-sensitive. It can seem intuitive that monthly maintenance costs for a team like GO Creative to keep your website running and secure will add up in no time to a large amount.
But when you look at the raw numbers, the regular, affordable website maintenance fee is significantly lower than the cost of paying for one-off work. And that’s aside from the fact that you may need to spend hundreds per year on software licences, backup services, monitoring tools, and so on.
One-off website maintenance and repair jobs from established web developers typically cost hundreds of dollars even for something small, because it’s simply not worth the time and effort.
For one of our regular clients, for example, we have completed 37 support tasks in the past 12 months (almost all proactively). If they were charged individually (as they would have been without a website care plan) the cost would have been nearly 10 times as much – and they wouldn’t have received any maintenance work or had backups in place, among other benefits of our website care plans.
It’s also important to keep in mind that when you have a maintenance provider working on your website regularly, they become much more familiar with your particular setup, which results in increased efficiency over time. On top of that, by building an ongoing relationship, makes it much easier and more enjoyable to work with your provider.
Free yourself of website maintenance worries with a free quote today
We’re one of Australia’s longest-running and most professional providers of WordPress website maintenance services. If you’re looking for a way to achieve peace of mind knowing your website is taken care of, protected, and working as optimally as it should, contact us today for a completely free web maintenance quote.
