09 Sep Why Does My WordPress Website Need Regular Maintenance?

We all understand and know the importance of having a professionally designed website for your business, but often, we see businesses fall into the trap of forgetting that much like your car, your website requires regular maintenance.

WordPress receives regular updates, sometimes multiple times per month, which helps improve the security and performance of the platform. Once these updates are rolled out, the core code, theme, and plugins that your website uses will also require an update to fix any bugs that might cause compatibility issues with the latest version of WordPress.

So, what happens if you don’t update your website regularly?

1. Your website and the data it processes can be at risk

Security is the number one reason why regular website maintenance is crucial. By failing to keep your website maintained, you run the risk of leaving the back end of your website exposed to hackers and bugs, where they can steal data like your form submissions, user data, or could even point your domain to their own websites so that when users search Google for your business, they’re redirected to another website.

2. The user journey can be broken

Have you ever loaded a website just to be left feeling frustrated that there are broken elements throughout the site, pages that fail to load, and forms that don’t get submitted? You probably clicked away; in search of a competitor whose website was easy to navigate. When websites aren’t maintained, the communication between the plugins, themes and CMS can break, causing elements on the front-end to break too.

3. Google won’t like you very much

The main role of search engines is to serve up the best quality content that is relevant to a user’s search. The algorithm can detect when people quickly bounced off your site or when your site is being pointed to a spammy website and slowly but surely, you can expect your search rankings to drop. By updating your website regularly, fixing broken links and removing any duplicated pages, your website will remain relevant and keep users coming back and in turn, will continue to rank well on Google.

Looking for website maintenance?

As a Digital Marketing Company, our team is ready to help you to discuss our different website maintenance options and have the peace of mind that your website will continue to perform at its optimal performance.