Websites are a lot like iPhones: they don’t always work the way you want them to. Just like a phone, your website has a number of moving parts in the backend that all need to work in unison to operate properly. In the case of a website, these “parts” include core files, theme files, and plugins. You can think of these like the operating system and apps on your phone.
Updates are constantly being released. And these updates are important – as they often address security or performance improvements. And just like your phone, the longer you wait to update, the more problems can arise.
In addition the core components of your site, browsers and web standards are constantly evolving. Even basic HTML is rendered differently than it was a year ago.
Key Point: Everything is evolving all of the time, and if your website doesn’t evolve at the same rate, you’ll start to see some big problems.
Maintaining your site will save you money
Big problems mean expensive problems:
- Lost revenue from marketing campaigns
- Lost sales
- Costs associated with fixing big problems
- Costs associated with remedying glitches like hacked user information
We don’t want to stoke fear, rather we want to really emphasis how important this is. Implementing a systematic maintenance program will save you money and build trust among your customers.
How to properly maintain your website
The best option is to have a professional take care of this. If you haven’t already, feel free to take a look at our maintenance and managed hosting services to see how we provide these services to our customers.
But here is how you can take care of this yourself:
- Before you do anything, make a complete backup of your site and database
- Update the core WordPress files
- Update your themes, starting with your parent theme than your child theme.
- Update your plugins, starting with Elementor then Elementor Pro. Follow this up by updating any remaining plugins
- Thoroughly review your site to address any issues in layout, design, and functionality.
We strongly encourage you to perform updates on a staging server! This is a critical component of our managed hosting service 🙂
