WordPress is one of the dynamic CMS platforms in the digital world today. However, it is prone to hacking and other cyber-attacks. Therefore, online businesses and WordPress website owners must take the necessary steps in keeping their websites safe and protected from any intruders.
One of the first things these businesses have to do is work on their website’s security, modern features, and functionality. All of these aspects would be related to the website maintenance cost. They have two options: either go DIY or hire a professional website maintenance service provider to do it for them.
But there’s one question that remains that you are probably thinking of right now.
Why Should You Maintain Your Website Website In The First Place?
There are several reasons for WordPress website maintenance. However, one of the critical reasons is already mentioned for hacking attempts and cyber-attacks. Apart from that, there are other operational issues that may occur in your website, including a lag in performance, broken links, plugin problems, an increase in spam score, and more.
When all these problems start to occur at once, they will start to deteriorate your business, adversely affecting your bottom-line, revenue, broken links; consequently, your website will end up completely useless for the potential users and yourself. So, what’s the best course of action in resolving this issue? Well, that’s what we’re going to find out in this blog post.
In this blog, we have put together the adverse effects of WordPress maintenance in detail, along with the pros and cons of hiring a professional website maintenance service provider. In that way, you can make a better decision whenever you are faced with a maintenance issue.
What Are The Worst Things That Can Happen Of Not Maintaining Your Website?
As we said above, many things could go wrong if you don’t timely maintain your website. So, here are some of the worst things that can happen of not maintaining your website.
Cyber-Attacks
The areas where hackers mostly attack are the loopholes in PHP code (including themes, core, and plugins), older apps hosted on the same server, login pages, web servers, and more. If you’re thinking about that, you’re not a big brand or the major government enterprise for them to hack. That’s not the case with hackers. This is because they will try to infiltrate any vulnerable website vulnerable to hack and give a second thought, whether they are big or small.
Most of the time, the hacks are based on how much vulnerable the websites are; when they find that loophole in the website system, they will most likely infiltrate all the websites that fall in the same category or have the same loophole. It’s a vicious cycle that keeps on expanding with no end in sight. In short, if you have a WordPress website, then you’re probably are a target to hackers. And if you don’t timely maintain your website, then you’re sure to become the prey.
You Lose Data
Do you what’s worse than getting your website hacked? You won’t believe it; it’s losing your data. That’s a fact. How? This is because when you don’t have a backup in place, you don’t only risk your website and but your entire business. And the scariest part is that it can easily happen. You can lose your data by a malfunction on the server, issues on cache, or a virus on your web server and various reasons.
Adversely Affects Your SEO
If you think losing data is worse, wait until you read about its effect on your SEO. Most online businesses solely dependent on the incoming traffic coming to their website. When your website gets an infected virus or hacked, Google or search engines penalize you for not maintaining your website timely that drops your rankings significantly.
Google is the master of tracking hacked or infected websites. If your website isn’t properly maintained, it’s highly likely that Google will find out and penalize you. You will probably get blacklisted, and visitors will see a message like this “The site ahead contains malware.” That means your visitors won’t be able to come to your website, even if they want to.
Is It Possible To Maintain Your Website?
Yes, it’s a possibility to maintain your website yourself; however, if your website has a lot of incoming traffic, then you may need to work on the following to properly maintain your website.
Timing
Can you manage to make time for the maintenance of your website? Or have you already got your hands full in operations? Suppose your business is booming, and you already have a lot on your plate. In that case, maintaining your website could severely affect your bottom-line.
Skills
Do you have the skills to maintain your website? Skills are crucial to maintaining your website effectively; if you don’t have the necessary skills, you should probably hire someone to do it.
Experience
Finally, you should have the utmost experience and expertise in WordPress website maintenance. So if you haven’t done it before, it’s better to stick with a staging website than making changes with a live WordPress website.
Pros Of Hiring A Professional WordPress Website Maintenance Company
By now, you may probably have an idea about the importance of maintaining your website; let’s find out the pros and cons of hiring a professional WordPress maintenance company.
1. Easy ToDelegate Resource
One of the biggest advantages of hiring a professional website maintenance company, it’s quite easy to delegate them the necessary resources as they know a thing or two about website maintenance.
2. Experienced Professionals
Professional website maintenance companies have the utmost experience and expertise in maintaining your WordPress website. They do the heavy lifting and take the burden off from your shoulders of fixing various errors and bugs on your website and make your website up to date.
Cons Of Hiring A Professional Of WordPress Maintenance Company
Even though there are pretty good pros of hiring a website maintenance company, however, there are also a few cons of hiring them, which shouldn’t be overlooked.
1. Break The Website With Excessive Coding
It’s always better not your leave your website to a website maintenance company, especially you have a custom theme that could easily break with few changes on coding.
When you’re a custom theme for your website, a few coding changes could have a disastrous effect.
2. Website Maintenance Cost
Even though you should never look at numbers when your website’s life is on the line. However, if you don’t have the budget for it, you don’t have any other choice but to maintain the website yourself.
There are website maintenance companies that generally charge around $50 to $500 for maintaining a website.
Suppose you have a small blogging website with insufficient revenue to pay for these charges. In that case, it’s better to maintain the website yourself and save the website maintenance cost.
Conclusion
Well, there you have it, all the important aspects of WordPress website maintenance. That includes why you should do it in the first place, the worst things that can happen if you don’t do it, the possibilities of doing it by yourself, and of course, the pros and cons of hiring a professional website maintenance company.
WordPress website maintenance is crucial to sustain and thrive your business. No matter if you have a startup or a major brand, if you want to protect your website from hackers, you need to maintain your website.
Otherwise, not only will you lose your visitors, but Google will also penalize you for it. If you want to prevent that from happening, hire a professional WordPress website maintenance service provider. That will most definitely give you a big sigh of relief.