Starting a website is easy, but running it continuously takes time and effort. As a business owner, you need not prioritize your time on website maintenance work and can be outsourced to someone who is already an expert and provides WordPress maintenance services.
But wait! Before jumping to the conclusion of outsourcing the work to a maintenance services company, you might have some questions like:
- What is the need to hire someone for handling your website?
- What do these WordPress service providers do?
- How much will they charge?
- Are they reliable enough to keep the website continuously going?
There might be many more questions other than these, and we will cover a lot of things in this article. By the end of this blog post, you will get acquainted with all the activities that are covered under services and also whether you should hire someone or not!
Let’s jump into the details and see what’s goes under the hood of WordPress services.
What do WordPress Maintenance services do?
Before we jump into the detailed services list, it’s good to answer the questions that might be running through your mind. Like we mentioned at the start, maintenance is time-consuming, but it is vital to keeping the website in top-notch working conditions.
Here are some of the activities that are handled by WordPress maintenance service providers:
Keeping things up-to-date:
Since the website is built on WordPress it uses a variety of plugins to handle different functionalities of your business website. These plugins and theme are prone to vulnerable cyber attacks like web-penetration, phishing attacks, etc. which might destroy your website or steal all your confidential data.
It is essential to keep the plugins and theme up-to-date as early as the updates are out. If some plugin is affected by an attack, the plugin author fixes the issue, and an update is released immediately.
Besides, some plugin updates itself ruin the website and this needs a rollback to the previous version. But this includes testing and fixing the compatibility issues with other plugins as well, which takes a lot of time in debugging things.
Frequent backups:
Backups are crucial and help you restore the website in the event of some breach, mistakenly locking out yourself, accidentally deleting the website, etc.
Basically, backups refer to creating several copies of the website and storing them on cloud spaces like Amazon S3, personal storage devices, and so on. The frequency depends upon the website changes and the business need. It can be once a day, week, month, or multiple times in a day as well.
While many hosting services provide an option for backup, we highly recommend the use of paid backup plugins because it is our sole responsibility to maintain the website and bring peace of mind.
Website Security:
While we already discussed that keeping plugins up-to-date keeps the website secure. But this is not always the option, because sometimes we would not be able to access the back-end in case of a cyber attack.
This makes it necessary to use the plugins that are designed for security purposes and are capable of handling a variety of online threats like Ransomware, Phishing, Data leakage, hacking, etc..
Besides, these plugins have a ton of technical settings to configure and connect with the server. Many times, there is a need to communicate with the technical support team of the individual product company. All these things take time, and you might quickly feel lethargic if you’re handling the security for your website.
Caching and Speed Optimization:
Caching is a process of serving saved files to the users, instead of requesting the same page to the server every time. It is one of the primary things done to optimize the speed of the website. Caching a website not only includes saving the static copies to serve the users’ faster but also the minification of multiple CSS and JS files.
For example, 10 different plugins generate individual CSS files which might take a lot of time to load. Minification is the process of combining CSS /JS files and reducing the overall size of a single file to be served on the frontend. This in turn, reduced the load time of the website and optimized the website speed.
Database Optimization:
Your website database contains all the information about the posts/pages, passwords, tables, and whatnot. Continuous caching creates a pile of bloated files in the database. Over time, the database gets populated and the trashed data occupies a considerable amount of disk space. Moreover, it becomes necessary to remove these files in order to maintain the speed and keep the database clean.
This needs the understanding of structured query language and removal of data from the file manager manually or writing query scripts to delete trash. Since this is a delicate job, it needs to be handled by the expert itself.
Basic support and Content Modification:
We have already seen the importance of keeping themes and plugins updated. Apart from this, WordPress itself keeps releasing new core updates form time to time to improve the user experience. Your service provider will make sure that the CMS is updated to ensure the safety and smooth working of your website.
Moreover, it is not limited to focus only on the technical aspects of the website, but content and marketing efforts as well. Your website represents your business, therefore it is wise to regularly update the content on the website may be pushing out new offers, discount coupons, or running interesting customer happiness campaigns on the website.
These tweaks and modifications will also be covered under the plans of your website maintenance services provider. This will help in boosting the Search engine optimization, and search engines will prefer showing your website when users search for your business.
Conclusion:
Website ownership brings in the responsibility to keep the website updated whether you like it or not. Perhaps it is crucial because you have decided to show your business online and you will not like to degrade the online reputation of your business.
We have discussed the things offered by the WordPress maintenance service providers and how these things are essential to keep the website running smoothly.
Although these things are burdensome, outsourcing these activities to a service provider company lets you focus on running the business rather than slaving time on the maintenance works.
If you feel we missed something and in case you have some questions to be answered, do let us know in the comment section below, we’ll be more than happy to answer you.
If you are looking for a reliable partner for maintaining your websites, please feel free to contact us. Our maintenance plans start at just $99/month.