WordPress Maintenance

Yes, you can, as long as you know what you are doing and have the time and discipline to regularly carry out the various tasks associated with WordPress Maintenance.

All WordPress sites run on multiple 3rd party plugins, all of which have to 'play' nicely with each other and with WordPress. But seeing as plugins are created by software developers who come from all walks of life, the quality of their work varies anywhere from good, bad to hideous, so the chances of something breaking are real and inevitable over time.

If your site has been hacked, your site may not show any symptoms and may appear to be running fine. You need to be prepared and have a good set of tools & processes to diagnose of fix software issues. Should your site break, you will need strong knowledge, good skills and the time to resolve all issues.

All too often, we get enquiries from clients along the lines of "My web designers are wonderful They built my website and said as long as you don't touch anything, you don't need to do anything more, and it will run forever!"

This is bad advice. Once your site has been built, the risk of anything going wrong may be small, but over time risk of things breaking and having your site compromised increases. If your site does break or becomes compromised or when you notice things aren't working as expected, you will most likely need to reach out to a developer to get your site fixed.

Don't be surprised to find that the cost of getting your website cleaned and restored will be significantly more than the annual cost of WordPress Maintenance.

All too often, we hear about website designers who fail to advise their clients about ongoing maintenance once their site has been built.

When WordPress was first released, the need to keep your software updated was not of a high priority. Software updates were generally only required when things broke. WordPress has evolved over time and has rapidly become the leading content-management system.

At the same time, hackers and criminals have discovered that there is a great deal of money to be made from hacking websites with a low risk of ever being caught.

The importance of protecting your site from hackers has never been greater, and software updates are released more frequently.

WordPress is used by 45.8% of all websites on the internet. (W3Techs, 2023), making WordPress one of the most popular open-source Content Management Systems (CMS) available.

With so many features, the software driving WordPress is complex, so it requires frequent updates.

While WordPress alternatives are gaining traction, such as Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify, their market share percentage comes nowhere near that of WordPress in both the website design and CMS market. /p>

We cannot guarantee that any software will be error free. It's important to think of software as an ongoing process that can always get better because perfection isn't attainable. Whether it's fixing a bug or building a new feature, there's always bugs and room for improvement. In that sense, software is never really finished.

WordPress also uses plugins and themes that are written by third parties. Nobody can guarantee the quality and again, we cannot guarantee that their software is written well.

We will use best practices to make sure your site is protected as much as possible.

Backups are great if you have the time to do them and you do them regularly. All too often though, this activity gets overlooked or given a low priority. When something breaks the situation, then it becomes critical.

Simply restoring a backup will often not resolve the issue. If your site was hacked through a vulnerability and you restore it from your last backup, the hackers will simply return and gain access again, as the vulnerability is still there. Backups are important, but you need to update all the software, plugins and themes regularly.