If you’re like most enthusiastic business owners, you were hyper-focused on the your brand website during design and development. Right up through the launch, you probably peeked in daily to see how your happy place on the internet was unfolding, and afterwards, at least for a few months, you may have made website review a part of your regular weekly routine.
However, as time passes and that beautiful new website becomes just another feature of your business landscape, it fades into the background. Your trips to your online real estate become more sporadic as your attention turns to other aspects of your business like marketing, staffing, budgeting, selling, forecasting, etc.
As you spend more time focused on the business your website brings you, you have less time to spend on keeping your site running at peak performance. When you do get around to making a quick trip to your site, you discover a laundry list of tasks, updates, and warnings that reappear no matter how many times you turn them off.
Your site, theme, and plugins all require regular maintenance in order to keep your website functioning properly and persuasively. Without those annoying maintenance updates, your site would be susceptible to plugin incompatibilities, theme breaks, and security breaches. Because WordPress is so popular, it’s a top target of hackers, and outdated software and plugins are the main source of malware infections.
When your website launches, your honeymoon period may be over, but your site is still in the business of wooing your target market. How moved will they be by a clunky website that’s slow to load? How much trust will be lost when clients are disappointed by broken features and breached security?
“I can totally DIY those updates. It’s just the press of a button.”
While WordPress is pitched as the perfect, hassle-free platform for tech-savvy entrepreneurs, it’s a technology like any other. And like any other technology, your WordPress website requires regular maintenance and upkeep. If business is slow, you may have time to address the steady influx of updates. However, if your business is growing, the regular care needed to keep your site secure, responsive, and running smoothly can become a drain on your time and energy.
Of course, you could simply click Update All and hope for the best. That’s what’s so beautiful about WordPress, right? It’s a DIY-ers dream!
Unfortunately, updates aren’t always as straightforward as the press of a button. All plugins are created by developers, but not all developers are created equally. Many are conscientious and attentive, offering regular updates to keep plugins secure and functioning. Some, however, don’t bother to update plugins, creating vulnerabilities that can go unnoticed for months and even years by the untrained eye. In other cases, one developer’s plugin may not play well with another developer’s plugin, and the end result is a malfunctioning website.
You may have the time and energy to run regular updates, but do you have the necessary know-how to address problems, breaks, and security risks when the DIY approach fails?
Save time. Improve functionality. Experience exponential growth.
Other than you, your website is the only employee you can expect to work around the clock and around the world. It can connect you with new markets, automate rote processes, and convert leads into brand advocates. And it doesn’t even demand minimum wage. The least you can do is keep your site at the top of its game.
You could spend your time fighting another WordPress update and jeopardizing your most valuable marketing tool. Or you could delegate your website maintenance to a professional equipped to handle routine maintenance, detect and prevent potential malfunctions, and keep your site secure. You’ll avoid breakdowns and system compromises, expensive emergency repairs, and breaches that can damage your reputation.
A professional developer can do more than keep your website running smoothly. She can improve your site functionality, your business processes, and your user experience. At the end of the day, she can optimize your website so that you experience exponential business growth.
Our Website Maintenance Workflow
I’ve watched clients work for months to create a head-turning brand and a delightful web experience only to undermine their efforts with poor plugin choices and diminishing functionality. I’ve seen business owners delegate critical maintenance tasks to assistants with no website knowledge or experience only to have the site broken by an unanticipated bug.
I’ve listened to e-commerce entrepreneurs lament their site’s slow speeds and poorly formatted product pages after uploading a bulk of new products without properly resizing the images.
Website maintenance and upkeep is time-consuming. It requires attention to detail, knowledge of potential problems, and experience. Here at Candelita, we’ve developed reliable, robust systems and processes to keep your brand website ahead of the curve.
- We back up your website before making any major change or update to protect your existing content in the event of a problem.
- We track all plugin and content updates so that we can easily identify the root of problems that do occur.
- We test the main pages once we’re done to ensure that the updates have not caused breaks or malfunctions.
- We include security and performance tests to ensure your visitors arrive at a safe, speedy, and fully functioning website.
- We run design sprints for content updates to implement smaller changes and test with faster results.
- We perform User Experience (UX) reviews to track the flow of traffic to and from the site, identify drop off points, and analyze overall performance.
- We use data we gather to improve what’s working and find new approaches to address what isn’t working.
In short, we do all of the things that keep your website running smoothly. And then some.
Can I just call you if something breaks?
Your website is a lot like a car. It requires regular maintenance to get you where you want to go. If you neglect those little Check Engine lights, at some point in time, you’re going to have a problem on your hands that’s way more expensive than an oil change.
Yes. You can keep your fingers crossed and allow your website to hobble along without updates. You can click the Update All button and hope for the best. You can trust that your plugins will play nicely and hackers will steer clear of your site. But at some point in time, a website that doesn’t receive the routine care it needs will just stop working. And much like a car repair, a site repair is a much more expensive proposition than a site maintenance program.
When your site collapses in on itself, you’re not just losing the money that you have to pay to bring it back online. You’re losing the money that disappointed site visitors take when they leave and don’t come back. You’re losing business opportunities when prospects arrive at a broken site. You’re diminishing your brand’s reputation and, therefore, your brand’s revenue.
Love your website, and your website will love you.
All those updates and tasks may have you feeling like your website is nothing but a never-ending Honey Do list, but let’s face it, your site does a lot for you, too. It brings in new prospects. It converts leads into brand advocates. It funnels revenue into your bank account. It’s a pretty sweet business partner, and it doesn’t ask for a lot. Just some TLC.
That’s where Candelita’s Website Maintenance can help.
We designed our comprehensive maintenance plans to offer business owners a truly hassle-free way to keep their sites functioning optimally. With our plan in place, you can focus on the areas of your business that need your attention the most and trust us to give your website all the TLC it needs to delight your visitors and grow your business.
We currently have limited space available for new maintenance clients. If you’re interested in gaining the advantage of an experienced website professional to optimize your web presence, please schedule an appointment to reserve your spot in Candelita’s Website Maintenance program.