What Is Website Maintenance?
Just as your business products, services and personnel can change over time, your website should be modified inline with those changes. Those changes can range from text, images, pages, and links to navigation, videos, employees, terms of use and privacy policy statements. As you can see, keeping these elements of your website up-to-date can be critical for your business’s success and growth.
More importantly than performing these maintenance procedures is performing them regularly. There are maintenance tasks that need to be performed on a daily, weekly, monthly quarterly and annual basis – and they all have varying degrees of priority.
Website Maintenance is not only required when something is broken. Just like you regularly change the windshield wipers, oil, oil filter and air filter in your car to make them more efficient, regular maintenance on your website can make is faster, easier to navigate and easier to find. Applying security patches and updating outdated code can also be included in the list of much needed website maintenance.
WordPress Maintenance & Security
WordPress is the most popular website distribution platform today – 28% of all the websites across the web use it. That is a great statistic but there are other numbers that tell a different story. Through Q1 of 2016, 78% of infected websites were built with WordPress. In all those instances of infection, the leading cause was traced back to exploitation of vulnerabilities in the plugins or other components, not the platform itself.
Regular auditing of the WordPress core files, plugins, users and secure communication methods are a must. Regular password auditing, spam management and web hosting maintenance are also crucial to securing the world’s most widely used content management system.
I have been working with WordPress since 2004, a year after it was initially released. A lot has changed aesthetically with the platform but securing it is still pretty straightforward. What most business owners run into is finding a designer that puts just as much effort into designing a website as they do into ensuring that it’s files, users, communication and code are secure. I take professional and personal pride in ensuring that every WordPress website that I manage is as secure as if it were my own website, whether I built it or not.