You invested a lot in your website and it’s important that you update the core software and the additional plugins to the latest software version and keep it secure from the modern threat of hackers.
But who does this? If you’re tech-savvy enough and do it yourself, great you’re saving yourself some money to invest in other areas of the business. But you will know the amount of time it takes each month to do those tasks when you could be focussing on more important areas of your business, such as lead generating.
However, if you’re one of many business owners that did invest in your website but now just leave it and “presume” your hosting costs each month covers you for updates, backups and monitoring then you might be in for surprise.
You have your website and you go with hosting providers such as 123reg or HostGator because they offer great hosting prices like £3 per month. Why wouldn’t you?
But consider for a second, if the minimum wage is around £7 per hour in the UK, effectively you’re only getting roughly 30 minutes of work each month on your website, which surely isn’t enough time to do much, is it?
Website Maintenance is exactly what it means. Getting someone to manage the website making sure everything is updated and secure each month so you don’t risk losing your website or leads.
It means everything is updated and running securely and not left to get out of date and open to nasty areas of the internet that will harm your business.
Some of the most important areas that need looking after each month are as follows;
One of the main ones was Backups. If your website doesn’t get backed up often or you have no support them you need to restore it, you could be left with a giant headache trying to figure it out yourself or an even bigger bill to get it sorted because cheaper was better at the beginning.
Websites like WordPress, Craft CMS and Joomla are powerful CMS (Content Management Systems) that usually have a number of installed plugins built in to help get the best out of your website, either it is for security, SEO or marketing.
Every so often, the CMS and the plugins themselves need updating to make sure that any issues are fixed and to stop holes in the code that hackers can exploit.
The dated code allows for hackers to easily infiltrate your website and take advantage of it, spreading malicious code or worse.
Making sure these are updated on your website is very important and failure can result in issues.
Like the classic saying “Who watches the watchmen?”, this relates to your website – who is keeping an eye on it? A website built, set live and left to gather dust doesn’t attract leads or bring in new work.
How do you know your website hasn’t gone down or been hacked? If no one is monitoring your website, then anything can happen to it – having website maintenance means peace of mind.
We all saw the story of the NHS getting hacked, this was due to their software and security being years out of date so hackers could easily infiltrate their system and cause chaos!
As mentioned above in our ‘Updates’ section, not having your security software installed, correctly configured and up to date, then once more you’re prone to hackers.
If you’re not managing your website, it might be worth getting in touch with your website hosting or web developer to check and see who is managing your website.
Check out our website maintenance services and get in touch for a free, no sale chat.
We love talking websites and happy to give advice.