Your website is a living, breathing creature. Well, sorta. Just like the software on your cell phone and the programs on your computer – your website needs maintenance in order to work properly. Not doing maintenance on your website is like running your car without oil. It may work for a short while…but it can come to an abrupt stop. And it’ll take a whole lot of work to get it back to the way it was. Your websites should always be live, ready for customers and visitors. It’s a reflection of what you do, so you want to be ready.
You can’t just set and forget your website
If you’re not managing the maintenance on your website each month, you are most likely throwing money out the window. If visitors stop by the site and notice something wrong, they’ll be on their way (most likely to your competitors), or they’ll simply just give up and find information another way if they’re even still interested. Many website owners NEVER check their website to see how it’s functioning. This is a deadly business mistake. If you haven’t conducted website maintenance or hired a company to do so – you’re most likely losing potential eyeballs on your business – and money.
Why maintenance is a great investment
Many people fail to realize the importance of website maintenance – especially on their WordPress websites:
+ WordPress releases upgraded versions all the time. Your website’s performance, it’s load time, downtime and uptime, is all dependent on the WordPress version and upgraded version of plugins that you have installed.
+ The website growth, it’s fresh content, analytics monitoring and design changes, is all dependent on you having someone making sure all updates to the website are done in a smooth and error-free fashion.
WordPress updates its core files often. You want to ensure you’re running the latest version.
Daily backups are more than a piece of mind
ALL of our maintenance plans include DAILY backups. That means, your website files (pictures, videos, etc) and your database (all the content written within the site as well as form data, customer data, etc.) are copied and backed up daily. We are very excited about this. This means that if anything were to ever happen to your website, we can revert back to yesterday, the day before, a month ago – you name it. That is serious piece of mind and the value of this service is worth its weight in gold.
Our website maintenance workflow
At Joker Media, we take great care to first backup the website, and check the website after our updates for any issues. Our software keeps a record of plugins we update so if there is ever an issue we see what plugin version was changed and revert back. We can also pull performance and security scans at your request. If in the event we ever catch a plugin issue, it becomes a support ticket and we address it before you ever know there’s a problem.
Why you shouldn’t do maintenance yourself (unless you really know what you’re doing)
Maintaining your site yourself could cost you more than you may think. If you just update from your WordPress admin, you wouldn’t have a record of what was done. If an update to a plugin created an issue a couple weeks later, it would be difficult to know what changed and how you should revert back without restoring a very old backup (and possibly losing content changes, sales orders, contact entries, you name it).
If you aren’t sure how to update your website correctly, you could be in for some nasty surprises.
It will cost way more to fix than to maintain
Inexperience and neglect can damage the look and functionality of your website. When that happens, you have a choice to make. One, you try and fix it yourself, in which case you may do further damage. Or two, you can then pay the (sometimes hefty) price for someone experienced to fix it. Remember the oil in your car? It will cost more to fix the car when it blows an engine than it does to add oil once in awhile (and have the oil changed by professionals). Regular oil changes help keep your car running properly, regular site maintenance helps keeps your web site running properly.
Let us do the heavy lifting
We can imagine you have enough to do and don’t need an added task of trying to maintain your company’s website. Why not deal with what you know best and let us deal with what we know best? Would you try to fight that court battle without a lawyer? Then why try to maintain your own website if you’re not a web professional? By securing an experienced web professional to update and maintain your site properly you are actually saving potential lost sales and visitors.