Reasons why your website needs ongoing maintenance to work correctly

Ongoing website maintenance is one of the most overlooked areas for website owners. So, even if you have never experienced a data breach, out-of-date plugins, or poor site performance, it’s probably time to look at the ongoing maintenance of your site.

What is website maintenance?

If you purchase a new car, you accept that it will need insurance, servicing, repairs, and an up-to-date MOT to keep it safe and running at its best. In many ways, a website is exactly the same as without this ongoing maintenance, a site owner may start to see smaller complaints quickly become large and complicated problems.

Despite the importance of regular maintenance, it’s surprising how few businesses actively have ongoing website support or maintenance in place. This could be due to a lack of information or knowledge on the subject, which is why we wanted to create this helpful guide.

In this post, we’ll be looking at what is meant by the term ‘maintenance’ and what bits of your website commonly need the most attention. We’ll also examine what happens when you don’t look after or maintain your website. Don’t worry though, we will also explore the overall benefits of ongoing website maintenance and support.

What Does ‘Maintenance’ Really Mean?

When speaking about a website’s ongoing maintenance, this generally refers to the upkeep of a website by focusing on its stability, performance, and functionality. However, different agencies will offer different packages which could be more task-specific.

Maintaining your website means ensuring that it continues to work in the way it was originally intended. If you have issues loading pages, broken images, misaligned elements, or an out-of-date CMS and plugins, then a maintenance package may be perfect for you.

It’s important to note that although you can maintain your website yourself, it’s always best to leave it with relevant professionals. Any updates that are made to a website may affect other areas of the site, these can often only be fixed by an experienced website developer.

Site Elements That Need Regular Attention

Every website needs regular attention – this is unavoidable. The first of which are updates to the Content Management System (known as the CMS). If a CMS (for example WordPress, or WooCommerce) requires an update, this should be done promptly.

The reason for this is that new versions of the CMS may stop supporting and working with services used by the site. It is estimated that close to 44% percent of all compromised websites were running an out-of-date CMS at the time of an attack. A well-versed website developer will be able to safely update the CMS, to ensure that no functionality is lost.

The second most common element to update are the plugins. Without being regularly updated, these may malfunction, or stop working all together. In severe cases, they could even break a website entirely, not just their own functionality.

Out-of-date websites pose a huge security risk, as obsolete plugins and CMS’s are often the targets of experienced hackers. Much like CMS updates, plugin updates should be done by a professional website developer, to ensure that these don’t affect the site negatively.

The third most common element for maintaining a website is keeping regular backups. Ideally they should be stored off-site, separate from the website. This way, if there are ever any issues with the website, you can revert to a previous backup to resolve it.

What If You Don’t Maintain Your Website?

As previously touched upon, leaving your website unmaintained can cause some serious issues; an out-of-date CMS or plugin can have the potential to break a website and can also leave it more vulnerable to hackers.

Without website backups, you may find yourself in a situation where important website files are lost and cannot be retrieved. A lack of an appropriate SSL certificate could also lead to your website being removed from search engines or marked as unsafe by browsers.

Much like our car analogy at the start, if you leave your car unmaintained you run the risk of complex complications, hidden issues, and unexpected emergencies. The longer you leave your website unmaintained, the more vulnerable it will be and the more difficult it will be to rectify.

Don’t take the risk. Your website is one of your company’s biggest assets, so you need to take care of it.

Benefits of Ongoing Website Maintenance

One of the many benefits of ongoing support for your website is ensuring that there are no barriers or hurdles for online customers. You want to ensure that nothing stands in the way of converting them into a sale, be that a broken contact form or a slow loading page.

Another benefit is having the peace of mind in knowing that your website will always work as intended and that it is in safe hands. You will rarely have an issue, and those that do occur will be promptly rectified by a team of experienced website developers.

Finally, you also get the benefit of being able to ask questions to people who know the answers. Our team, for example, is always on hand to answer any web-related questions that you may have (not just anything to do with website support or maintenance).

What This is Fever Can Offer

Here at This is Fever, we offer a range of bespoke website maintenance packages, which are based on your specific site and company requirements. All of our packages are affordable for even the smallest of businesses, so we won’t charge you “an arm and a leg” each month.

We can also host your website at an affordable cost and with the added benefit of being hosted at data centres powered by renewable energy.

Our website developers have decades of experience and are avid problem solvers, leaving no stone unturned if you run into any issues. We also constantly monitor website activity, so we can be made aware of specific issues the second that they happen.

If you would like to speak with our team about ongoing website maintenance and support, then please do not hesitate to get in touch with us. You can give us a call on 01206 364 674, submit a contact form or email us directly at hello@thisisfever.co.uk.