So you’ve got your WordPress website up and running. You’re drawing some traffic and getting some leads. It’s easy to get comfortable at this point and let things slide. But you want to make sure that your website is safe from hackers and up to date with the latest technology. You might want to take a look at one of several WordPress maintenance plans available on the market.
Because WordPress is such a popular CMS, it’s often the target of hackers who scan the web for vulnerabilities with botnets. For this reason, it’s important to keep all of your plugins, themes, and WordPress core up to date to the latest versions. Once a vulnerability is made public, you can be sure that hackers are going to be looking for it and exploiting it.
Not to worry though. If you’ve used reputable plugins and themes in the development of your website, chances are the developers will be on top of any new public vulnerabilities long before hackers have a chance to discover them on your website. That’s why it’s important to have a plan for staying on top of WordPress updates.
Not So Fast — Don’t Pull the Trigger on Updates Yourself!
This is the tricky part. You’re not a web developer who is familiar with everything that goes into running WordPress. Performing WordPress updates can get you into a great deal of trouble. Let’s say a plugin that’s crucial to your website releases an update to their code that makes some pretty drastic changes. They’ve probably done some testing to make sure the changes won’t break anything in WordPress. But have they tested their changes with every other plugin and theme that’s running on your site? Chances are, no they haven’t.
This is where WordPress maintenance plans become so vital. The successful operation of a WordPress business website depends on them. By having a professional web developer come in on a regular basis to do the job, you’re saving yourself a lot of grief. A web developer will know where to look and what to do if an update goes wrong. This minimizes your website’s down time in the event of an update problem. Your web developer will know what to tell the plugin or theme developers if something goes wrong. They will be able to get the issue resolved so that they can proceed with updates as planned.
In addition, WordPress maintenance plans will often include security maintenance, SEO and page speed optimization. Are you serious about having a successful business website? If you use WordPress, it just makes sense to have a maintenance plan in place. You will draw more traffic, have happier visitors, and avoid any issues with hackers.
If you want to talk to a web developer about maintaining your website, contact us today.
