WordPress is definitely one of the best ways to get your presence out on the web, however after getting their site live, site owners run into the question, “Does WordPress need maintenance?”

Isn’t it scary when an expensive piece of equipment you own or an expensive app crashes, especially if your business depends on it? 

Your business processes can be put to an abrupt halt and sales could stop, which means you will lose money! Just like car insurance prevents you from having a huge repair bill from a car accident, having a maintenance plan for your website can prevent devastating losses for your business. If you have a WordPress website, it is highly recommended you enroll in a WordPress maintenance plan. 

What is WordPress Maintenance?

WordPress website maintenance packages usually include the following: 

• Backups
• Updates of WordPress core/plugins/themes
• Basic troubleshooting
• Uptime monitoring
• Monthly reports
• Recommendations for improvements
• Content creation (optional)

WordPress is a Content Management System which means WordPress websites have multiple components and files to make them work. Some of the main components you may be familiar with are plugins and themes. 

Many developers and companies create these components for anyone to use on their WordPress websites. If you take a look at the official WordPress website you will see thousands of plugins and themes available. Even though there are plenty of options to use, (over 55 thousand of them), not all of them are great. Some may have poor code, so not only will it work poorly, but can also open a gateway for hackers to break your website. 

Does WordPress Need Maintenance even if there is auto-updating?

To prevent issues caused by plugins, it is highly recommended you keep all of your plugins and themes up to date by updating each one to the latest version. Plugin and theme updates can be very time-consuming and sometimes a plugin update can be incompatible with a theme, so the auto-update plugin feature may not always be the best course of action. An effective plugin and theme update process can be very valuable to your website. 

Now imagine you added a lot of new content to your website, but your site breaks because you installed a bad plugin. Wouldn’t it be handy if you had a backup to your website, so you can relaunch it while you’re searching for the bad plugin? Backups are incredibly handy because they are direct copies of your website. In the event of a crash, you wouldn’t have to do a complete re-installation of WordPress and re-publish all of your content. 

While updating your website’s content you may run into theme and plugin incompatibilities. Sometimes WordPress core may not work with your theme or plugins. Your website can break in ways such as the WordPress dashboard displaying poorly, live pages of your website displaying poorly, or even the white screen of death. These issues will require you to do some WordPress debugging and troubleshooting. The troubleshooting process may even require you to directly manage your WordPress files (wp-config file, .htaccess file, etc). If you try to edit your WordPress core files with little to no development skills, you can break your website even more! A great debugging and troubleshooting process can help determine the cause of your website crashing, so you can be aware and prevent them from happening again in the future.

Besides plugins and themes, your WordPress website can also be affected by the quality of your hosting provider. There are many companies that claim they’re great for WordPress websites, but they can actually be terrible for your website’s performance. It is very important to see what your hosting provider offers for your website and how it keeps it secure. Some hosting providers offer automatic backups and uptime monitoring. An uptime monitoring tool checks your website regularly at intervals for its availability (checks to see if your website is available/can be accessed at different time intervals) . These intervals can even be set to custom intervals if you would like frequent notifications of your website. With this feature, you would be quickly notified if your website is down and can fix it right away. 

Does WordPress Need Maintenance to Enhance Engagement?

You may want to look into more ways of enhancing your website by acquiring certain data such as: 

• What time your website generates the most traffic 
• How people discover your website
• What pages are your users looking at the most and how are they interacting with the page

Acquiring reports from this data can help you plan out the future content of your website and offer great recommendations for planning any upcoming sales or campaigns you would like to launch. Coming up with effective strategies can be very time-consuming so you may want to add content creation to your maintenance plan, so you meet your marketing deadlines. 

Your website is your only 24-hour employee for your business, so it is critical to ensure your website is functioning properly and helping you achieve your business goals. Putting in the work to properly maintain your website can appear very daunting, but we can help! We offer multiple different plans that can meet your needs and business goals. Have more questions or concerns? Contact us today and we will happily help you with your WordPress website’s needs.

Does WordPress need maintenance? Definitely so, however, it doesn’t need to be expensive or taxing. WordPress maintenance tasks don’t have to be your concern. Contact us at WP-Tutoring.Com for expert WordPress Support Services today.

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