7 Reasons why WordPress maintenance is important. Number 6 may surprise you.

It’s well known that WordPress is the most popular content management system in use today, and it has been for years. This means that there are a lot of WordPress websites out there on the web, and they need to be maintained to keep them secure and performing well. Let’s go over some important reasons why maintenance is so important for WordPress users.

Why is WP maintenance important for your website?

At it’s most basic level, regular WordPress maintenance is very important for your website as it helps you to keep your WordPress website performing at its best. Your website is your 24 hour a day marketing machine. By keeping your WordPress site up-to-date, you can ensure that it’s continually grinding away for your business, at its peak.

But what are the 7 issues that regular WP maintenance tackles?

1. Security.

The main (and obvious) reason to keep your site updated is for all of the security benefits. WordPress, being so popular, can be a magnet for hackers. Regular WordPress updates and maintenance can help to ensure that any new WordPress vulnerabilities on WordPress core or plugins don’t affect your site.

Regular WordPress updates help prevent unauthorized access to your website by hackers and malicious intruders who may otherwise find ways to exploit an outdated WordPress installation.

As part of any update plan, a review of your plugins and themes should be part of your maintenance routine. We would also recommend taking the opportunity to review the list of users who access to your site, and their access level, particularly if you have external staff, marketing people or developers working on your site.

2. Speed.

It’s well known that speed is one of the biggest factors in determining your website rankings. If you want to be able to compete with bigger companies, and rank on Google for competitive phrases, you need a fast site!

One way we’ve helped our clients increase their page load speeds by as much as 30% (and more) has been to update their WordPress core and plugins.

This makes for a happy visitor, and we’re sure you want that!

Regular WordPress updates can help your site load faster than ever before!

You don’t need us to tell you what problems slow page speeds cause – but here’s some food for thought: up to 40% of your visitors will abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load.

But it’s not just about download times. Slow servers and CPU usage by poorly configured WordPress installations are also major factors in slowing down your site.

By keeping WordPress up-to-date, you can ensure that the latest WordPress security patches are applied and that any new caching plugins or optimization strategies have been implemented to improve performance.

In short – regular WordPress updates will help keep your site running as fast as possible!

3. Server Uptime.

Even if you have a great web host, outdated or buggy WordPress plugins can place an undue load on the server, risking unscheduled server downtime. By keeping WordPress up-to-date, you are helping your website stay online 24/365!

The last thing any business needs is a website that’s unresponsive when they’re looking for new customers or clients. Google regularly crawls sites, and if your server is down, it can cause damaging indexing issues that can effect your long-term rank.

Regular WordPress updates and maintenance means your website is always up and running as best it can!

4. Disaster Recovery.

Regular WordPress updates are also important for disaster recovery – if you have an emergency and need to restore your website, the latest WordPress core files will make things much easier!

By keeping WordPress up-to-date, you can ensure that the latest WordPress security patches are applied and that any new caching plugins or optimization strategies have been implemented to improve performance.

Your WordPress update plan should include regular full backups of your site (to a separate drive) as well as any WordPress content that’s been uploaded.

Some hosts will store backups on the same server (which might be acceptable if you broke something, and needed to roll back to an earlier version). But if there is a hard drive failure, having backups that are taken as part of a regular maintenance plan, mean that you can still recover your website.

5. Save Space.

Regular WordPress updates means a chance to review and remove any old plugin files that are no longer being used. If you have plugins which haven’t been updated in over two years, it’s time for them to go!

This will free up space for new content, or anything that needs to be stored in the database. Keeping WordPress up-to-date means space will not be taken by old plugin files that aren’t being used. If you’re hosting is limited, this can be important for keeping hosting costs down and making sure everything runs smoothly!

6. Discover New Features.

While many of the reasons on this list focus on benefits that correct negative issues, there is a real positive benefit that many site owners overlook.

Updating WP Core and plugins is a chance to check out any new features which could provide you with extra functionality for your WordPress site that you never previously had access to.

This can be useful for keeping up-to-date with the latest WordPress developments, adding in new features that your customers will appreciate, and will make maintaining the content on your website even easier to manage.

And this is crucial. Older versions on WordPress, while good in their day, are limited to use compared to what we get to work with now. With the latest version of WordPress, and some new and improved plugins, you’ll want to create more content!

This also then ties in with the following SEO benefits.

7. Improve Search Engine Optimisation.

Since WordPress is such a popular user-friendly platform, and WordPress websites often rank very well in Google (a trend we’ve seen continue to increase over the past few years), good WordPress maintenance can help you stay ahead of your competitors for search terms that are important to your business success.

The SEO of your website can be improved through regular content creation, which can be achieved easier with basic regular WP maintenance.

Regularly updating WordPress means that you can implement the latest SEO techniques (such as word-searches, meta tags and images) to improve your site’s rankings.

And as mentioned earlier, speed can help improve your SEO. Updating WP Core can also help to ensure pages are loaded faster than competitor sites who might not have their website up to date with modern day standards!

What does WordPress maintenance include?

When thinking about WordPress maintenance, it’s good to have a plan. Maintenance can include anything from backing up the WordPress files and databases, updating WordPress core files, removing spam comments and fixing any plugin conflicts.

While WordPress provides you the ability to update core files automatically, we find it is safer to update WordPress core files manually. While WordPress is updating, there can be a chance of plugin conflicts and the update could break your site which means you need to take it offline until all issues are resolved.

We typically run the updates manually offsite, and then push the updates to the live site once it has been fully tested.

We advise our clients on how they can manage the basics mentioned above and we even offer a regular WordPress maintenance package that includes all of this.

How to know if you need wordpress maintenance and when to get it done by a professional?

If you are finding it difficult to manage WordPress issues on your own, have no time for WordPress maintenance or are facing WordPress problems regularly, then hiring a professional is the best solution.

There are many reasons why this makes sense:

• You don’t want to risk breaking your site because of something that could have been prevented by keeping up-to-date with the latest WordPress standards.
• You don’t want to waste time on tasks that a professional can do for you quickly and reliably.
• A WordPress maintenance package is usually affordable.
• You are losing money if your site is not ranking or converting visitors into customers because of poor WordPress maintenance!

We offer professional WordPress maintenance services at very affordable rates to help you achieve all the benefits mentioned above. Our team can manage everything from website speed optimization, plugin and core updates, resolving plugin conflicts, spam issues, and fixing general WordPress errors.

To find out more about our WordPress maintenance packages, please contact us today!