Basic Website Checkup & Maintenance Plan

Why Website Maintenance is Essential

Why Website Maintenance is Essential

All WordPress websites require a varying amount of maintenance each month. The longer the site is left unattended and unmonitored, the greater the chance of much larger issues developing resulting in avoidable unnecessary fees. There are many types and levels of website maintenance ranging from basic to advanced.

The amount of monthly maintenance required each month depends on things like:

• The Size of the Website
• How Under-Developed the site is
• If E-commerce is installed
• The number of Plugins, Addons, and Software installed
• The Complexity of configurations
• The level or lack of Security that is in place
• The length of time the site is left unmaintained
• If the site is getting decent traffic & website visitors
• How it looks on mobile devices currently
• How badly compromised & infected the site is now

Typical Website Maintenace includes:

• Web & Marketing Checkups
• Basic Website Maintenance
• Advanced Website Maintenance
• Ecommerce Maintenance
• Product Management
• Content Updates, Additions, and Improvements
• Security Maintenance
• Performance Maintenance

Why WordPress should receive Regular Maintenance:

WordPress is a Website Management System made up of thousands of files, scripts, plugins, addons, themes, security, and many other functional elements that require regular updating. 

Most WordPress websites consist of between 15,000 and 35,000 files, software, plugins, addons, multiple programming languages, and countless settings & configurations. That’s a lot to leave to chance exposed on the World Wide Web. All installation, configurations, design work, development, integrations, forms, and all the time and efforts are also at great risk if a website is left unmaintained, unmonitored, and vulnerable on the Web.

Software developers are constantly making improvements and rolling out security patches for your website. If a WordPress website is left to sit unattended without receiving any of those updates, and other regularly needed maintenance, many errors and vulnerabilities can develop that can cost you sales or even website outages.

Having a commercial grade professional looking website is a pretty critical component for most businesses these days. It is an important investment, key digital asset, and face of any business on the Web.

What can happen if your WordPress Website is left unattended?

A Lot can go wrong that it takes a seasoned operator to spot and fix! Without physically searching for issues, many can affect your website security, performance, marketing, and sales for a really long time without you even knowing it.

Not doing website checkups and maintenance can cause:

• • Your website could crash due to compatibility issues, bugs, errors, failures, and other conflicts.
  • Unnecessary costly repairs that could have been avoided and are often much more difficult to fix.
  • System, Software & Plugin issues can arise that can lead to loss of functional or website failure
  • Your website will become increasingly vulnerable to attacks.
  • You & your Customer’s sensitive information could get stolen and exploited.
  • Sensitive System information could get exposed and used to compromise your website and customers.
  • Your website could be Hacked due to outdated WordPress, Plugins, Addons, Scripts, and Themes.
  • Important emails, notifications, and renewal dates are left unattended resulting in NSF Charges.
  • Customers could experience site issues and lead to loss of leads and sales without you even knowing.
  • Mobile issues could exist and go unattended for a long time causing an immediate 50% loss of sales.
  • Important Google Errors can develop that will remain unresolved causing rankings and traffic to fall.
  • Website Performance Issues can develop causing slowness resulting in customers and search engines fleeing.
  • Your site will miss out on new features, benefits, bug fixes, and all the hard work of all its software developers.
  • Your site will place a higher strain on server resources further indirectly affecting your ability to rank well.
  • Your site could get infected, or taken over by malware or ransomware.
  • Strange Display Issues, Errors, Spacing, and Overlapping Text, could cause low customer confidence.
  • Unexpected anomalies on the frontend that customers will see.
  • Once your site goes down and left to get worse, the cost for recovery could be steep if even possible at all…
  • Your site could be plagued by bad backlinks and placed on blacklists affecting your domain and email health.
  • No one will be at the helm watching for issues, security threats, errors, or any trouble customers are having.
  • Your site and database backups will remain outdated, untested, and pile up on the server.
  • Your site database will become increasingly bloated affecting performance, traffic, and user experience.
  • WordPress & Database Vulnerabilities will increase eventually leading to a total site takeover.
  • Website Spam & Malicious Comments could lead to more bad backlinks, back doors, and malicious threats.
  • Your site’s forms could develop errors that cause submission errors costing you valuable leads and sales.
  • Domain & DNS Issues could exist and cause frequent outages and traffic loss.
  • Plugin Junk will increasingly add up leading to database and server bloat, errors, and possible corruption.
  • Email authentication issues could exist causing some or all your emails to go to junk folders.
  • Your site could have broken links leading to nowhere and leaking valuable SEO & Ranking Power.
  • Technical SEO issues could exist affecting traffic levels, leads, and sales all year long.
  • Large images may exist that require proper naming, sizing, optimization, and basic SEO.
  • Problems can remain undetected for weeks, months, or all year long costing potential sales every day!

Your Website is your Most Important Digital Asset and Face of your Company on the Web:

A Good Website is a collection of all incremental efforts done during the lifetime of any business. It is a by-product of your overall business model and worthy of continuous improvements & regular upkeep. It is a valuable digital asset and investment no business can afford to lose. Especially if it has a growing amount of website traffic and visitors.

Yet most web companies charge high fees for very minimum tasks they put on auto-pilot… That means they keep charging but don’t actually do any manual checkups, maintenance, or monitoring of any kind. They just keep collecting with no actual progress ever being made…

But most importantly, there will be no one at the helm watching for website, security, performance, & SEO issues or making any incremental improvements!

If you are seeing your website go down frequently, displaying strange errors, or redirecting to weird pages on the web, Don’t Wait! Don’t leave the digital side of your business left unattended! Could be a sign of an intruder!

For more info, see this Article on The Hidden Consequences of Not Doing WordPress Website Maintenance 🙂