Every WordPress website requires some sort of maintenance on a regular basis. You can’t just launch a website and leave it like that. You will need the plan to keep maintaining the website so that it can help you to grow your business.

One good news about WordPress is that it doesn’t require maintenance from your end all the time. Because it is in active development mode and continuously receives updates from its developer community. These are in terms of plugin, theme, or code updates.

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Apart from that, there are some things that you need to actively maintain on your WordPress website. In this article, we are going to discuss some of the most convincing reasons why you should maintain your WordPress website.

Let’s learn all about them in detail.

Reasons Why You Need WordPress Maintenance

Explore top reasons why you need a WordPress maintenance plan for your WordPress website.

1. Better Site Performance

The first and the most obvious reason for site maintenance is speed and performance. If your WordPress website is not performing at peak performance, it is keeping money on the table. In simple terms, every visitor that bounces off your website is going to visit another website and order products from there. This is a loss of not just one order but recurring sales.

With better site maintenance you can easily close this loophole and get back lost customers.

2. Improved Site Security

Your site is not secure if it is not updating new patches provided by WordPress. WordPress usually offers 4 to 5 crucial updates every year that include security patches. They help site admins improve site security, reduce the risk of hacking, and ensure that cybercriminals don’t attack the site. Most websites that are not updated to the latest WordPress security patches are prone to hacking attempts.

3. Enhanced User Experience

How do you know that your users are getting the best user experience? You know by split testing pages and checking the data provided to you, right? That is part of website maintenance. If you don’t have maintenance plans available to optimize your site landing pages, you can’t enhance the user experience. Not enhancing the user experience would eventually decrease your site’s value and reputation. As a result, your order volume will decrease and people will move to other better stores that are already trying to beat you. That is why WordPress maintenance is so important.

4. Updating Plugins & Themes

Your plugins and themes require regular updates because of two reasons. Updated plugins offer better features that either had bugs or that were not available to the users. Similarly, theme updates ensure that your themes perform better and faster for the users. Updating your themes and plugins is also important because they can have security loopholes that are automatically patched due to updates.

5. Backing Up The Site

WordPress maintenance is also important to completely back up your WordPress website. This ensures that the data available on the website is not only secure but in case your website is hacked, you can restore that data with the click of a single button. You can even schedule daily backups for your website or use plugins like Updraft that can back up your website easily if needed.

6. Check Site Health

How do you check that your WordPress website is in good health? Here are a few things that you should check for.

  • Check if the site has regular backups available
  • Make sure that the WordPress website doesn’t have any broken links
  • That the website doesn’t have bandwidth or storage limit
  • That the website doesn’t have any page speed issues
  • That the database of the WordPress website works properly

7. Monitoring Uptime

There are many bots available now that you can use for monitoring the website’s uptime. If you are using a hosting solution that doesn’t offer a monitoring bot for the site’s uptime, then go for a WordPress plugin that checks for uptime on a daily basis. This shows you that the website is always available not just for you but also for others who are trying to visit it.

8. Saving Costs

Maintaining a WordPress website on a regular basis ensures that your overall site costs are reduced. Take the example of a car. If you drive a car and don’t maintain it, what will happen in a few months? Your car will stop working. Why? Because it requires maintenance but you are not providing that maintenance. In the end, you will end up paying more for the car’s maintenance instead of what you will pay right now. This is how much you are saving in terms of website design costs with WordPress maintenance.

9. Increase Brand Reputation

Your brand is a representation of you. And your brand is represented by your website. Now if your website is designed badly and offers a poor user experience, what will people think about you? This will impact your brand reputation directly. Badly maintained websites have numerous mistakes, broken links, dead pages, and outdated content that projects an unprofessional image and can leave a terrible taste in the mouths of your consumers.

10. Doubling Site Revenue

Last but not the least, we are doing everything for business. WordPress maintenance is also a great way to improve your business. You may ask how?

Well, if you don’t maintain your website, it will start to lose the number of visitors it gets on a regular basis.

Think of your competition. It is always trying to beat you and if you are not taking your competition seriously, then you are in oblivion.

WordPress maintenance is not just a part of your website it is a crucial factor that can directly impact your business’s bottom line.

Choosing the Right WordPress Website Maintenance Plan

You have a limited budget, you have a limited team, and biggest of all, you have limited time. WordPress maintenance is not something you can do on your own.

So, what are the options? Get a WordPress maintenance service that can do the job for you.

The main problem, when choosing a WordPress maintenance service, for most WordPress site owners is that they are unsure how much they should invest. Most WordPress development agencies offer multiple plans for their users so that they can choose the one that best fits their needs.

When starting with a WordPress maintenance service, you must choose only the bare minimum. You can then upgrade the package when it is needed.

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Source: Pexel

1. Pick a Plan Based on Your Website Size

You need to know how much traffic your website receives, the storage capacity, and the hosting plan it has. After that, decide the type of maintenance plan that will suit it.

If you have a local business website and you get visitors from the local area, then you can subscribe to the basic package. You won’t need a lot of A/B testing and you just need an updated WordPress website with better-performing landing pages.

2. Find a Package That Suits Your Budget

You indeed would have a budget in mind if you plan to hire a WordPress maintenance service. So, what is your budget going to be? Make sure to hire a WordPress retainer for essential maintenance. This way, you would know how much you should spend on the maintenance service in the future. Like, if your budget is $500 per month for WordPress maintenance, you can get a dedicated agency for maintenance, regular iterative backups, security updates, and site edits. If you have a $1000 per month budget, you can even hire a custom developer that will manage your website and provide development fixes as and when needed.

3. Ask the Agency Relevant Maintenance Questions

Here is a list of questions that you should ask the WordPress maintenance agency:

  • What type of maintenance service do you offer in a single package?
  • Do you offer landing page design and customisation services in the same package?
  • Do you offer backup and security maintenance services for the website?
  • How do you manage performance issues? 
  • What is the load time of other websites that you are managing?
  • How do you test new features/plugins or themes on the website?
  • How can I get in touch with you if I have some ad-hoc change requirements?

>>> Discuss Your WordPress Maintenance Project With Us Today!

4. Is There a USP of the Agency?

Each website maintenance agency offers a unique offering that others don’t. One agency may be offering performance features; another may be offering security features. When it comes to subscribing to one, make sure to assess your own requirements. 

Find out what requirements you need for your own website maintenance. Can the agency offer those services? Or, if there is a custom plan they can offer you, ask them for it.

This is how you will have the right maintenance plan for your website maintenance.

5. Full-Service vs Ongoing WordPress Maintenance

When it comes to WordPress maintenance, there are two types of packages available. One is the full-service WordPress maintenance package. And, the second is the ongoing WordPress maintenance package. The first one is expensive because it includes theme customisations, site design, and regular maintenance. 

While in the second package, you hire an agency for regular maintenance and updates. 

Most agencies offer both packages, and it depends on which one is best for your needs.

Our advice is that you start with the ongoing maintenance package and then move to full-service maintenance and development if and when needed.

6. Managed Hosting vs WordPress Maintenance

Last but not least, there is also some confusion among site owners about managed hosting and WordPress maintenance. They think both offer the same services. The answer is NO.

Managed hosting will only offer taking care of server-level issues. These include updating the PHP version, securing your server, and adding security fixes to the database and server if and when needed.

On the other hand, a WordPress maintenance agency won’t go into the depths of servers. It will only focus on WordPress-related issues like performance, security, development errors, backups, and similar others.

What services are included in a Website Maintenance Plan?

1. Site Optimisation

The agency you hire for site management should offer site optimisation such as technical management, fixing site 404 errors, fixing 5xx errors, and optimising the overall hosting stack.

2. Performance Issues

If your website has performance issues, ask the agency to resolve them – this should be included in the maintenance service package. Performance issues should be a part of the regular maintenance plan as well.

3. Development & User Flow

What if you need new landing pages? Can your agency create them while staying within the maintenance plan budget? Find an agency that can create landing pages when you want them to.

4. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Can they set up A/B tests for your landing pages? Although CRO is a marketing activity, it requires technical development on the site. So, make sure that your WordPress agency can provide that.

5. Backups & Security

Finally, make sure that the agency offers adequate protection for your website in the form of 2FA, IP whitelisting, SSH, SSL, CDN, and site backups.

WordPress Website Maintenance: What to Avoid?

Just like in our daily life, even in digital businesses, our habits determine our future.

This saying is also true for people who want to properly manage their WordPress websites. 

Since WordPress maintenance is a serious task, when you have the option to manage your website, you have two options available. 

  1. Do it yourself
  2. Hire a company to do it for you

Most people, due to their workload, are not able to take proper care of their WordPress websites and that is where they falter. 

If you are one of these people struggling with your site management tasks, you have to make some necessary changes to your habits.

In this article, we will discuss which habits you should avoid when managing a WordPress website.

Not updating the WordPress core regularly, using cracked themes, creating multiple clones of the site, not cleaning WordPress website databases… These are some bad habits of people who use WordPress for their businesses.

Let’s discuss these bad habits in detail and see how they can cause performance issues for your site and lead to lower profits for your business in the future.

1. Not updating WordPress Versions on Time

WordPress offers two major updates every year. These versions will show up on the WordPress panel itself. You have to just click on the update button to update the core automatically.

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Source: WordPress dashboard

If you have some custom plugins or customized themes on your site, then updating the core version can cause some serious issues. That’s why most people just don’t update it. This is a bad practice. It creates loopholes on websites that hackers can easily gain access to.

Make sure that you properly update the WordPress version and don’t procrastinate while doing so. 

If you can’t do it yourself, you can hire a WordPress management agency to do the job for you.

2. Not Backing Up WordPress Websites Regularly

Do you know why your website gets so much traffic? Because it has data available. You don’t want to lose that data, do you? So, why are you not backing it up regularly?

Over 30,000 websites are hacked every day. Your website can be next. Make sure that you always keep your website properly backed up as that will help you to keep your data protected in case your website gets into a hacking attack.

There are many decent plugins available like UpdraftPlus that you can use to automatically schedule regular WordPress website backups.

3. Using Cracked Themes & Plugins

Many WordPress users have the habit of installing cracked themes and plugins.

If you can’t afford a WordPress theme, use a free one. But NEVER and we mean NEVER buy a cracked theme or plugin. 

Cracked themes often carry malware or viruses that can cause issues on your hosting server. If you are using a shared hosting server, the virus can also cause issues on other websites. If this happens, the hosting company will permanently ban your website and they may not even give you the data of your website. So, make sure to always use proper plugins that are either bought from WordPress marketplaces or given by other trusted people to you.

You can also use a staging site to see if a plugin/theme is working properly on your site. Once the plugin is installed, use Sucuri to test the staging site. Sucuri will tell you if there is malware on the site.

4. Not Using Cache on Your Website

Your WordPress website requires faster performance so that it can rank higher in search engines and get more traffic. When the site is not using a cache service, it won’t be able to offer better performance to its users, hence the business will suffer.

We observe regularly that WordPress users have the bad habit of not using a cache service. They procrastinate in adding relevant plugins on their site and that is why they struggle at business success. You don’t want that to happen to your site, do you? 

Some good WordPress cache services you can use for your website are WP Rocket, Nitropack, and Breeze. Go for a premium service to ensure that you get the performance boost needed to elevate your website.

5. Delaying Comment Moderation

This is a known fact that WordPress websites that get a lot of traffic through organic channels, also get a lot of comments. Most of these comments are spam. They don’t have any meaning and they are only posted for the sake of getting a backlink from the site. This is an unacceptable practice.

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Source: WordPress dashboard

The problem is that WordPress keeps these comments in the database if you have put them in moderation. And, they can get into thousands so you better moderate them daily. Because if you don’t moderate them, they can also lead to slow performance, storage issues, and even link spam (if they are published).

Many WordPress users tend to ignore the comment section. This habit should be avoided. If they want, they can use a plugin service like Disqus on their websites to ensure that only relevant people can post comments on the site.

6. Not Having a Mobile Version of the Website

In 2023, the majority of websites are a huge part of their visitors from mobile devices. If you are struggling with business success, perhaps the reason is that you don’t have a mobile version or a responsive website design. 

Not having a responsive version of the site is one habit that site owners should avoid at all costs because it can cause a drastic impact on the business’s bottom line.

7. Not Giving Importance to Your Website Security

Security is crucial for the stability of your WordPress website. Websites that are not secure often get into security problems because of the vulnerabilities they have. 

Most WordPress users have a habit of not securing their websites. They don’t have Two-Factor Authentication (2FA), Whitelisted IPs, SSL certificates, or CDN service on their website. 

All these can cause security loopholes that intruders can use to get access to your website data.

8. Not Having Relevant Forms On Your Website

Last but not the least, have forms on your website so that visitors can add their information.

We have seen this on a lot of websites. Most websites just don’t have forms or call-to-action buttons on the relevant places on the site. They don’t have forms available and as a result, they lose a lot of leads. This is bad for business and this is bad for the site owners that are trying hard to squeeze leads from the visitors.

Make sure that you have lead forms on all pages of your website. This will allow website visitors to easily provide their information if they have a question or if they want to avail of your service.

Ready to Change These WordPress Habits?

We hope that you are now familiar with a lot of bad WordPress habits that cause issues on your website. To ensure that your business runs smoothly in the long run, make sure to change these habits with a better one.

If you are juggling time for site management and need a helping hand, then our WordPress management experts can help you with that.

Related Read: WordPress Maintenance Costs for Australia

We hope that you are now aware of why you need a WordPress maintenance service to create a proper maintenance plan for your website.

If you are not sure how to hire trusted WordPress maintenance experts, get help from our experts.