You may not think that it is important but your church or small business WordPress site needs maintenance on an ongoing basis. Not only can it prevent a multitude of issues, maintenance can greatly improve the quality of your site. Don’t think of your site as something you put together once and then it’s ready to work for you for a long time. Instead, think of it as a well-oiled machine. In order for it to be successful, it needs to be worked on and maintained.
Here are the 10 biggest reasons why your small business WordPress site needs maintenance.
Security
One huge reason why your wordpress site needs maintenance is for security purposes. The less you maintain your site, the more vulnerable it is to hackers. WordPress is constantly updating to help keep it as secure as possible (among other reasons), but there are hackers who are just waiting to find any fault in sites to take advantage of. If you have lots of plugins and bells and whistles on your site, there are many ways for shady people to get in and mess with it. Another way your site is vulnerable is if it has an old passwords. Passwords should be changed regularly for optimum security and minimum vulnerability to intruders. Maintenance services as well as self-maintenance can help keep your site protected from hackers.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Naturally with any site, a big goal is to have as much traffic as possible, and a big part of this is SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. The more problems your site has, the further it falls in search results and the less traffic your page is going to get. A stagnant site will also have a poor SEO, as search engines always want to bring users the newest and most accurate information that is available. Keeping your site updated with new content keeps your SEO high and keeps traffic flowing to your website.
Page Speed and User Friendliness
The longer you leave a site unattended, the more issues will start to pop up- broken links, bugs, and other issues that make the site less user-friendly. Issues that could easily be fixed run rampant on a site that isn’t being maintained. This can be detrimental to a brand, causing small issues that could easily have been kept at bay with a little maintenance to deter potential clients/customers.
Software Updates
WordPress is always updating, whether it’s adding new plugins or changing the way it works. It may seem like a lot of work to keep updating, but it’s important to make sure your site runs as smoothly as possible with minimal lagging and other issues.
Analytics
A maintenance service for WordPress can run analytics on your site to help you understand and fix issues with your site that you may not even have noticed yourself. It’s important to run analytics to make sure everything is working with your site, and to understand the source of any issues it may have.
Information Accuracy
Things are always changing. It’s part of life. This is also the case with your brand, business organization. Maybe the contact information changed, or a promotion ended. Whatever the change is, it should be reflected on your site. The information on your site should always be accurate and up-to-date, and this requires- you guessed it- maintenance! Otherwise, you can end up losing business or other interactions because the information on your site was not inaccurate.
Regular Data Backups
A lot of things can cause issues with your site, whether it be security issues, bugs, or switching hosts. Whatever the reason, your site can end up offline. If a hacker gets in and destroys your site, without having your data backed up, you’re left to start back at square one. Regular data backups can be easy and even automatic, and save your site from potential turmoil.
Engagement
Engagement with visitors and clients is an extremely important form of maintenance on your website. Read comments on your posts, and reply to them. Start conversations, encourage people to check out your social media, or even just like comments. Simple interactions can keep someone interested in what you’re doing and bring them back for your next post. If someone comments on a post with a question and never gets an answer, they’re less likely to come back. Engaging with visitors keeps the traffic flowing to your site.
Fresh new design
As miniscule as it seems, if your site has a dated look it can lead to a poorer user experience. The internet is always changing, always introducing something new! You don’t want to get left in the dust, you want to keep your website looking fresh- whether you simply move things around or change the whole theme, the feel of your site can have a lot to do with the interactions your site gets.
Overall better performance
Clearly, maintenance is key to having a site that looks good, runs well, is safe from hackers, and gets plenty of traffic. Maintenance can make or break your online presence- and it’s so simple! The fact that your Small Business WordPress Site Needs Maintenance should be included in your organization’s schedule. Doing this should make it clear how much it supports your business or organization as a whole.
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