According to W3Techs, 43% of all websites are built with the WordPress CMS framework, and so, if you’re reading this, your website probably is too.
As an agency, we work exclusively with WordPress for the following reasons:
The ‘pros’ of WordPress websites.
- Cost-effective to build with.
- It’s highly scalable:
We can easily add extended functionality through the vast premium and free third-party plugins. - It’s fast and simple to make edits.
- Great blogging capability.
- Clients can easily learn to maintain afterward, even for non-technical people.
- Highly versatile – you can create a diverse range of website types.
- Highly customisable.
- SEO & Google friendly.
Unfortunately, some of WordPress’s biggest pros, also expose some of its disadvantages.
These ‘cons’ are:
- More vulnerable to being hacked if you don’t have good systems and processes in place.
- WordPress websites require 10-50 different plugins to achieve a desired business requirement. These plugins are made by different developers and don’t necessarily account for each other. This can cause conflicts that break the website. These plugins and themes often get updated for important reasons, which can cause a website to go down without warning.
For these reasons, it’s necessary to regularly maintain your website to
- Minimise website downtime.
- Keep it functioning correctly.
- Keep the site loading fast.
- Keep the website more secure.
Now, to help you make sense of it all, let’s start with
1. Minimise website downtime.
There are many reasons why a website can go down.
You need to ask this question:
“What impact on my business would my website down have?”
Loss of leads?
Loss of sales?
Tarnishing of brand reputation?
Wouldn’t it be great to have the peace of mind to know that you had a team who was regularly maintaining the website to try and minimise this unexpected disaster? Or if you had a team on hand to get your website back up?
2. Keep it functioning correctly.
Over 10 years of developing and maintaining WordPress websites, we’ve experienced many instances of an important functionality randomly (and inconveniently) stop working.
For example, we’ve seen:
- Contact forms stop working
- Online payments stop going through
- Site load time slow down
- SSL certificates expire
- Content go missing
3. Keep the site loading fast.
Unfortunately, we’ve found that when clients try to manage and maintain their website with new content, the site tends to slow down.
This is usually because images and videos haven’t been optimised for web correctly. Having someone that knows the ins and outs of websites is helpful to keep the site fast. Google loves to rank fast sites and doesn’t love slow ones.
Wouldn’t you hate to lose a potential customer because they didn’t want to wait 10 seconds for your site to load?
4. Keep the website more secure.
To prevent malware infections and reinfections, our first recommendation is to use a premium Malware removal and prevention service called Malcare.
For step-by-step instructions, check out our quick guide for WordPress website malware removal & prevention.
I’m here to chat if you have any questions,
Stay safe,
Dan 🙂