You’ve built a brand-new website and it is shiny and funky. You love it, your customers love it. You are so proud that you show your family and friends, and they love it too. You pat yourself on the back and move onto the next project. Job done. Box ticked. Happy days.
But then, one day in the not-too-distant future, it starts falling over. You run the analytics and traffic is down, people aren’t staying on the site and sales are slipping. Everything looks the same but your results are worse than they were for the previous site. What the hell happened?
Nothing. Nothing happened. You fell into the trap of buying the new car, driving it around to the admiring glances of others, and then leaving it in the garage to rust while you suddenly got obsessed with building a home cinema.
Website maintenance might well sound like the dullest thing on the planet but it is actually critical to the success of your business. In case you hadn’t noticed, the world is a dynamic place, and nowhere is this more true than on the internet.
If you don’t run a regular audit of your website, you are guaranteed to miss problems that are leading to failure, and you don’t get the chance to deal with them before they arise.
You need to keep a regular eye on the structure, design and content and look for ways to keep improving. Ensure plugins, PHP and WordPress versions are kept up to date. Look at speed and accessibility, image optimisation, internal and back links. Sweat the small stuff.
When it comes to technical issues, the risk is that you don’t think about them until they go wrong. When that happens, you want to be the first to know about it. Even better, prevent them from happening in the first place. If your customers see it first, you’ve already damaged your brand reputation and potentially lost revenue because of your negligence.
Who wants to visit a slow-loading site with broken links and plug-ins that don’t work? We all know first-hand what we think of a site like that. You give up on it and go elsewhere. That shiny new website you worked so hard on is now dying. Leave it too long and building a new one from scratch will be cheaper than fixing it. We’ve all had that conversation with the garage.
It’s not just customers who will spot this either. There are plenty of people out there looking for an easy way to make a buck and hacking a poorly maintained website is like taking candy from a baby. There are lots of tools freely available to download on the web that will let bored teenagers into your site so they can look around and take or destroy what they want.
Imagine what a serious hacker could do.
Security is one of the top priorities for users visiting your website. Everyone wants to know their data (and money) is safe. Key updates to your server, firewall, plugins and valid SSL certificates are simple and straightforward steps that help keep the hackers from the door. If you back up your data regularly, at least you won’t be losing data forever if they do get in.
Let’s not forget why you built the site in the first place. You wanted to be seen. If you don’t maintain a solid structure, with safe plugins and regularly updated content, you are much less likely to be crawled and ranked higher by Google.
If you want to be liked by Google (and we all do), then you need to make sure you have high-quality content, valid backlinks, fast loading speeds and simple navigation, as well as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
So, if you still feel like doing nothing, go ahead. But if you want to understand whether your WordPress website needs maintenance, sign up for our free audit. We’ll make sure you’re as happy with your website today as you were on the first day you saw it.
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