Just like a vehicle or a building, your website requires regular maintenance to keep functionality working correctly and to keep your website secure. Plugins are continually updated for security and performance and outdated plugins can pose a security risk. In addition, regular web maintenance ensures your site is running as quickly as possible and is optimized for search engine optimization (SEO). Below are some reasons to do regular, monthly web maintenance.
Reasons for Web Maintenance
- Security – Hackers are always looking for vulnerabilities and outdated plugins and versions of content management systems such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. When a hacker sees that plugins for these websites are not updated, they can either take advantage of a current exploit, or create a new one. Aside from plugins, it’s also important to keep your content management system updated to new versions. Developers for plugins and content management systems are continually working on creating new, more secure versions of their products and it’s vital to your web security to keep up to date.
- Performance – A website is a well-oiled digital machine, and when your plugins aren’t up to date, these plugins can become clunky and can break, which in turn, breaks the functionality on your website. Examples of broken plugins could include missing elements including maps, images, and forms. This creates a poor user experience, which effects your overall search engine ranking.
- Speed – Speed is part of the overall performance of your website, but it’s important enough to have its own bullet point because speed is a crucial factor in your search engine ranking. When developers push out new versions or updates to plugins or content management systems, it’s because they have improved these products, often optimizing for speed.
- Save money – When a website is not routinely maintained, it can cause more problems that require additional time and money to fix. Like ignoring regular oil changes, a website without maintenance can eventually come to a halt with a variety of broken functionalities, slow speed and poor user experience. Unfortunately, this can take more time for a company, like Baseline to fix. As they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Web Maintenance is Available
Baseline Creative offers regular, affordable, maintenance for websites that we’ve built, as well as sites we didn’t build. Our service includes regular plugin updates and security checks by a real, live developer! Our team will make updates, test, and make optimizations as needed. If you’re interested in regular updates, contact your account manager, email us, or call us at 316-260-5294 and we will answer questions and get you on our schedule.
