The Importance of WordPress Website Maintenance
Benefits of Proactive WordPress Website Maintenance
One of the areas where the biggest disconnect between digital marketing agencies and their clients occurs is the idea of web maintenance, specifically on WordPress websites. Continue reading if you’d like to gain a better understanding of what maintenance of a WordPress website actually means and what it looks like.
Monthly Website Maintenance Explained
When WordPress first came out, it quickly became one of the most popular content management systems because it was designed to be the simplest do it yourself website where clients could easily make changes on their own. However, during the last decade, the function of WordPress has changed significantly, becoming the most robust content management system for websites. Meanwhile, new platforms – like Webflow and Squarespace – have been released that function better as DIY web content management systems.
Changes to WordPress have included the growth of page builders and plugins that give both web marketing agencies and their clients the opportunity to do anything they want with a website. The downside of these changes is that they have caused a higher need for maintenance. As a result, digital marketing agencies will often perform monthly maintenance through WordPress that their clients aren’t aware is happening.
At NorthWing Digital, when we’re maintaining a WordPress website, one of the first and most important things that we’re doing is maintaining a staging copy of your website in addition to the live site. This allows us to make simple changes to the staging site and ensure that they work correctly before pushing them to the live website. If these changes were immediately made to the live site without being tested for errors first, it could result in the website going down. Maintaining a staging copy of a client’s website also allows us to perform proactive maintenance to make sure that new software updates don’t have a negative impact on other elements of your website.
This happens most often with plugin updates. Plugin updates happen automatically at times and on a rolling basis. Sometimes, it’s hard to know when the next plugin update is coming. When the plugin provider pushes a new update through, it can negatively affect your website or even take it down. This is also true with page builder updates. If your WordPress site is using a page builder like Elementor or Divi, updates can potentially wreak havoc on your website and result in downtime.
Digital marketing agencies are proactive about preloading imminent software updates to our clients’ staging sites to make sure everything works properly, thereby minimizing downtime. By ensuring updates will be seamless, clients can avoid their websites going down and agencies won’t have to scramble to correct an issue after it has occurred.
A common question that clients will ask is “doesn’t the hosting company do this for me?” Some do, some don’t. Even those that do test updates before pushing them through to a live site do so on an automated basis across hundreds of thousands if not millions of websites. As such, keeping your particular website up at all times isn’t a priority for them. This is why it’s always beneficial to work with a reliable web marketing agency that is focused on keeping your website up 100% of the time by working out any issues with new updates before they reach your live site.
Learn More About WordPress Maintenance
Would you like to learn more about proactive WordPress maintenance and how it can benefit your company’s website? Connect with NorthWing Digital today and we’d be happy to share more information about the monthly website maintenance we perform for our clients!