Like your your smart phone and all your other devices, websites require maintenance to keep working smoothly. It's like having an oil change in your car. You wouldn’t be able to keep your car very long if you didn’t take care of it, right? The same is true for your website. Your website should always be up and running at its peak performance, ready for customers and presenting your business in its best professional way.
Websites Cannot Be Built and Then Left Alone
If your website doesn't have monthly maintenance, you may actually be throwing money away. When website visitors find things broken or incorrect, they generally will leave the website. Many website owners never check their website to ensure it is functioning correctly. Website issues or downtime can cost you potential customers.
Maintenance Benefits
Many people don’t realize how important website maintenance really is.
The website performance - load time, downtime and uptime - is completely dependent on the WordPress software, plugins, and themes functioning correctly, as well as being on the most recent version.
The website performance, functionality, new content, analytics monitoring and design updates are all dependent upon you having someone ensuring that all updates to the website are done consistently, reliably, and most importantly - correctly.
Maintenance Workflow Importance
At Centner Consulting, we take exceptional care to first backup the website prior to any updates, and then to check the website after our updates for any issues. Our monitoring software records all plugins and themes that we update, so should there ever be an issue we can easily recover. We also provide a monthly maintenance report that include information about updates, performance, and security scans. We are constantly monitoring your website for any critical issues - such as outdated or vulnerable plugins or themes that become security risks. When we catch issues, a support ticket is opened and we address it before you ever know there’s a problem.
Dangers of Do It Yourself Maintenance
Maintaining your site yourself could cost you more than you may think. If you were to perform updates from your WordPress Dashboard, you would not have a record of what updates occurred. If a few weeks later, an issue occurred as a result of a plugin or theme update, it would be harder to track what had changed and how to recover. You might have to restore an older backup, risking the loss of data like content updates, sales orders, contact entries, etc.
Repairs Cost More Than Maintenance
Inexperience and neglect can cause damage to not only the look of your website, but also its functionality. When that happens, you will need to make a decision. One, you try and fix it yourself, in which case you may cause further damage. Or two, you can hire an experienced professional to repair it, often at a hefty price. Just like your car, proper maintenance is cheaper than the repairs caused by neglect. Regular oil changes help keep your car running smoothly, regular website maintenance helps to keep your website running smoothly and securely.
Call in a Professional
Why not do what you know best and let us do what we know best? Would you try to perform a tune-up service on your car? Then why try to maintain your own website if you are not a website professional? By securing an experienced web professional to keep your website up to date and secure, you are actually saving potential lost sales and visitors.
Plus, what might take you hours to figure out, we already know and can handle in a swift and accurate manner, thereby saving you time that could be used to increase your revenue.
If you’re interested in securing a maintenance contract for your web site, contact us to learn how we can keep your website running smoothly, safely, and securely.
