5 Reasons Your Website Needs Maintenance

When designing and developing a business website, many business owners do not realize how essential it is to have a long-term site maintenance plan. Website maintenance is crucial to your website’s health, even more so if you are running an eCommerce business. Whether it’s fixing a bug or implementing a feature to improve your site’s user experience, making small but regular updates is an essential part of managing your website.

In this article, we give you five reasons why you need website maintenance.

1. AVOID GETTING HACKED

The top reason is the most evident one: security. We have all heard the news about data breaches, hackers exploiting security flaws and taking over high-traffic sites, making away with sensitive user information and in some extreme cases, taking down the whole website. 

To keep your site from falling victim to attacks, you must create a security protocol with steps before, during and after such an incident. Furthermore, the older a piece of software is, the more time hackers have to figure out its vulnerabilities. 

A slow website that runs on outdated code is usually an easy target because hackers can exploit it without much trouble. If you are regularly updating and improving your site or have invested in a website maintenance package, you are less likely to fall victim to similar attacks.
For example, a critical and potentially damaging unrestricted file upload bug in Contact Form 7, one of the most popular plugins on WordPress, has recently been patched.  The version 5.3.2 update for this form comes with a much-needed solution to protect the 5 million active sites that have installed this form. 

That said, without devoting resources to website maintenance, the owners of these sites may not have known about the problem with the form in the first place until unfortunately, they encountered an attack. 

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2. UPDATED FEATURES AND PLUGINS

Site updates provide enhanced features and added functionality to your website. It keeps your site running as smoothly as possible with the best results. It also updates any plugins you may have running on your site, giving your users a better overall site experience.

The sooner you implement these updates, the sooner your site gets new features or functionalities. The longer you wait, the higher the chances of encountering a problem when you finally update your site. The more you update, the less likely problems will arise.

3. SAVE RESOURCES IN THE LONG RUN

The effort required to install updates later down the road instead of immediately is considerable. The developer will need to spend more time making the updates because the impact on the site is greater.

Regular website maintenance acts as a form of diagnostics. Just like getting regular checkups from your doctor can help you avoid more serious health problems down the line, website maintenance can prevent small bugs from turning into significant issues. You will be able to save time, money, and effort if your website is in the hands of a team of professionals safeguarding it. You will reap its benefits in the long run.

4. EASY VIRUS REMOVAL

Even with all the security measures in place, getting a virus or malware is always a concern. Having a website maintenance package means some people will quickly investigate and remove the virus, clean up the website and restore the data as soon as possible. 

This also includes contacting search engines and browsers that have blacklisted your website because of the virus. You can’t be 100% protected against viruses, but having a team of professionals maintaining your site will make it more difficult and less attractive to hack. In the event it happens, it can be addressed and fixed efficiently.

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5. BACKUPS

Whether the data loss comes from a malicious hack, a disgruntled contractor, or human error, businesses should have a recovery plan in place before you need it. If your website gets wiped entirely, you will not need to start from scratch if your website is well-maintained, i.e. you have daily backups of your website. If disaster strikes, you can be back up and running in minutes, not months.

PROTECT YOUR WEBSITE WITH PRIORITY WEB SERVICES

Leave everything in the hands of experts.  Forget about doing everything on your own and let us do the work of maintaining your website for you. Priority Web Services experience and web security solutions provide us with reliable expertise to help safeguard websites from potential threats. Reach out to us and learn more about the PWS Web Maintenance Value Package and put up your site’s defense today! Email us at [email protected] for a free consultation!