Website maintenance for small businesses is essential to keep attackers at bay. It protects your database from being hacked. Although WordPress maintenance is not a guarantee against hackers, you have a better chance of maintaining a healthy and free-from-malware website.
Before we discuss the details on how to maintain a website by yourself or with the help of a technical expert, you need to have a basic understanding of how a website works. Why? Because it helps you visualize how attackers can gain access to your site.
What is a Website?
A website often has a domain name registered with a hosting provider. It is available worldwide and accessible by people who know the domain address. Your site will encounter many challenges that may or may not put it at risk to attackers or make your site unappealing to users.
These challenges include:
- Different browser access
- Accessibility Issues
- Security breaches
- Backup procedures
- Multisite creations
Different Browser Access
Why does this become a challenge to you as a business owner? Users visit your WordPress website differently. They use a different browser or people visit your site using the same browser.
With this fact, you need your site to be responsive in whatever devices your visitors use as a browser. A responsive site relies heavily on how you design it.
You can either use a plugin or a tool to monitor the responsiveness of your site. Alternatively, use the responsiveness tool integrated with WordPress. That’s more than enough to see how responsive your WP site is.
However, if your developer changes some aspects of your website, it would be good to have a tool in handy to monitor responsiveness.
Security Breaches
Every day, visitors come and go. Some of these visitors are old and potential customers. Others are attackers who will try to get back-end data about your site.
Who is responsible for keeping your login details? You. But, your hosting provider also has a big role in keeping your site safe from internet marauders.
Security breaches are common. They will never go away no matter how sophisticated your security plugin is or how extensive your security processes are.
Your chances of not getting hacked increase when you choose your hosting provider carefully and stay vigilant for possible security breaches. Moreover, prepare a cybersecurity plan. This plan helps in addressing these issues.
Accessibility Issues
Aside from responsiveness, user interface (UI) is also an essential aspect of your website. Ensure that the UI is friendly. Visitors, users, and subscribers can find the navigation area.
Fonts shouldn’t be too small or too big. Columns are perfectly balanced and images are used appropriately. The overall design can make up the aesthetic quality and accessibility of your website.
Backup Procedures
Like other systems, files and databases are two of the most important foundations of your website. These need backup regularly. Unfortunately, many small business owners fail to create backup procedures. Worst, they don’t have existing programs or backup solutions in place.
Backup has become an issue for business owners because they don’t have time. Two, they don’t have the budget. If you’re one of them, it’s time to start thinking about the future of your website.
Multisite Creation
Some small business owners have multi-site for branding and marketing purposes. It’s good if you can maintain these sites properly.
What if you couldn’t? Then, you’d be wasting your resources. You can either manage them or let an expert perform some maintenance tasks on those websites you aren’t maintaining regularly.
Why this has become an issue? Your information is linked on those websites. If you don’t update or maintain them, you’re risking your data to attackers.
8 Website Maintenance Tasks
Website maintenance is the process of keeping the website error-free and up to date. What tasks can you do to maintain a website or multisite? Here are several tasks you can do on your own or delegate to an expert developer.
Update your content
WordPress maintenance isn’t just about backing up valuable data. It is also keeping your content updated. Provide engaging content that your subscribers and potential users will want to read.
The first few lines of your intro are critical areas where users decide whether to continue or not. If they decided to click on your link, you have to keep them rooted in your content. Give valuable information they can use to solve their problems with website maintenance or any niche you choose.
Activate Social Media Icons
Social media is the new standard. If you want new visitors, make your site shareable to others. Activate social media tabs in easy-to-spot areas. You can place them on your side, header, or footer of a page.
Having these features on your website means you’re updated with the latest trend. You can even have a dedicated social media manager if you can’t do it yourself. In social media marketing, tools are super useful.
Update Your Plug-ins
Plugins come in various functionalities: webpage builder, security, backup, and a lot more. Update these plug-ins. Many attackers use outdated plug-ins to hack into your WordPress.
Also, choose plugins that best suit your needs. Remove plugins that you haven’t used in months or are useless.
Redesign Your Website
Should you redesign your website? If you should, how often should you redesign? Some small businesses redesign their website every two to three years. The number of years depends on you.
When do you redesign?
- when you introduced new features on your site that your old design couldn’t accommodate
- when the theme is outdated, and the newest version is ages ago.
There are other reasons, but it all boils down to functionality, mobility, and other factors.
Monitor 404 issues
404 issues are bad for SEO. They tell your visitors that you don’t maintain your site. These issues involve broken links. You can either use a tool to monitor these issues or randomly check links on your site.
Create a Backup Plan
A backup plan should always be part of your maintenance tasks. If you don’t have time to create one, ask an expert to do it for you. Review the plan regularly to ensure the procedures are still applicable to your current situation.
Increase Awareness
Awareness of maintenance tasks and updates can help you a lot. You don’t have to know them extensively. A basic update will sufficient, and you can coordinate with your developer if you have one.
If you don’t, you can still consult an expert about the newest trends, updates, and technologies relating to your website maintenance. In case you have a team handling the back-end of your website, make sure you know what they’re doing.
Monitor Your Competitors
This task may not be a direct maintenance task, but competitor monitoring is still important. It can help you stay updated, too. You don’t have to do the exact things your competitor does. Instead, you can innovate based on the data gathered without having to spend too much.
Maintenance Services for Websites
Let’s just say, you don’t have the expertise to do maintenance tasks. Your next option is to avail maintenance services for small business websites.
Often, these people form a group or a company and cater to people who don’t have time for maintaining a WP site.
Why Buy Maintenance Services?
Availing of maintenance services for websites is useful for people like you who have little time to spare. Why should you buy these services?
- Increased security
- budget-friendly
- updated SEO trends for your website
- great designs
Often these companies have experts on technologies related to website maintenance. You can take advantage of that expertise. Learning these things may take time and will eat up your schedule.
Maintenance Services Cost
The cost will depend on the scope of work, but many services are affordable. All you need is to ask for a quotation and see if you can afford the price.
Just be transparent about the things you want, so the maintenance service company can give you an honest quotation. How should you choose the company?
You can either go for those teams with extensive experience or those new in the field. Teams with more experience might charge higher than those new in the industry.
It doesn’t matter. What you need is to select someone who can deliver the quality you need in website maintenance.
Final Words
Never ignore website maintenance tasks. These tasks are essential for all websites, whether new or old. You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars. What you need is to choose quality, and quality doesn’t have to be expensive.
Ready to update your site? Give us a call or send us a message, so we can assist you.
