Software is great, it comes full of features and functionality that makes your life easier, but in order to benefit from all of those features it needs to be kept up to date so that it runs smoothly and is free from issues. And the reality is, a website is made up of a number of different pieces of software, all designed to give you a great set of benefits while keeping things safe and secure.
The fact is, you wouldn’t continue to use outdated software and you shouldn’t do this on your website either. Old and outdated software is prone to breaking down and can be subject to security issues and other problems, so keeping everything up to date is just good practice… much like keeping your car regularly serviced (you do keep it serviced right?).
Keep things up to date and your site will be live a ready for customers, presenting your business in it’s best light and ensuring that your visitors can achieve their task(s) when they take the time to visit.
Reality Check… Websites Are Not “Set & Forget”
You might like to think that once your website is built, you can just leave it to sit there and “do it’s job” without having to worry about keeping it up to date or whether there’s a security issue to worry about… unfortunately this is just not true.
If you’re not looking after your site and keeping it up to date, then you could simply be throwing money away every day. If people are visiting your site and find that it has problems or worst yet that it has been hacked, then they’re not likely to stick around and bother to learn more about your business, let along trust you with their money.
Too many website owners never bother to keep on top of their website and ensure that it is running smoothly, consequently if there is downtime or issues that get in the way of a customer’s journey, then those are customers that will likely never return.
So, What Are The Benefits Of A Website Care Plan?
Well for starters, here at Webxactly, when you sign up for a care plan you’re going to be in great hands. We take care to ensure that your site is up to date each month and that we have a backup should anything disastrous happen. Our process ensures that updates go smoothly with little to no impact on your website (your visitors are unlikely to even notice) and we keep records of what is done when on the off chance an update does have a knock on affect.
We ensure that we are performing regular security and performance checks (depending on your plan) to ensure that your site continues to perform just as well as when it was first launched, and if anything does go wrong then we have processes in place to get you back up and running as soon as possible.
In short, we worry about all of this technical stuff so that you don’t have to.
Considering Doing It Yourself?
At the end of the day, this is an option…
However, I would caution you to consider whether you really want to become a website expert or if you have better things to do when it comes to running your business? Yes, you can go into the WordPress admin area and run the update process yourself, however it doesn’t keep track of what was updated when, so if you do run into issues then it can be very difficult to figure out what the root cause is.
Furthermore, if issues are caused then it’s possible you won’t have a backup to hand that is recent which means any changes to your website leading up to the issue may be rolled back, causing you additional work to get back up to speed once you get the site back up and running.
Of course it’s up to you… but leads me to the next consideration.
Treatment Is More Expensive Than Prevention
Look, we’re not going to leave you hanging if you do decide to take on your own maintenance and then something goes wrong, however any work that we have to do in order to track down the issue and then fix it, is going to cost you money. Depending on how broken the site is, it’s more than likely that it’d cost more to fix an issue than it would to have been signed up to one of our care plans from the outset.
Think of it this way, you’re much better of paying to get your car serviced regularly than you are to ignore it until the check engine light comes on. At that point you’re probably looking at some serious cash to get everything back into usable shape, and the same can be said for keeping your website up to date.
Keeping your site up to date on a regular basis will be far cheaper than fixing a couple of large issues 1-2 time per year.
So What Should You Do Now?
Well the simple fact is, you’ve got a decision to make.
Let an expert handle the maintenance and updates for your site and sit back knowing that you’re site will be in tip top shape for the foreseeable future (and read the monthly report each month that’ll confirm this), or…
Spend a bunch of time teaching yourself how all this WordPress stuff works and having to get your hands dirty every time there is a core, plugin or theme update, or worse still healing with security or hacking issues.
I certainly know what I’d choose if I wasn’t in the business of building and maintaining WordPress websites.
After all, it’s most likely that you got into business to do something in particular and worrying about the technicalities of how your website (which at the end of the day is a tool to enable you to achieve other things) actually works.
So take a load off your mind and let us take care of things for you. Check out our website care plans and if you want to have a chat about how we can help, then get in touch.