What is WordPress website maintenance?

WordPress website maintenance keeps your website running smoothly, fixes errors, updates systems to add features and protects from unwanted hackers. You will also want to keep your information and the look and feel of your website up to date to make it more attractive to potential customers. WordPress maintenance is much like looking after a car. It’s important to service your car, put fuel in it, fix broken parts, tidy it and even add new features, like snow tyres in the winter. If you want your car to go faster, then it will need a tune-up or even a new engine – just like your website!

For those websites built on the WordPress CMS platform, there are essential updates needed to keep your website running smoothly.  WordPress regularly makes updates to the core CMS system. Plugin developers update their 3rd party functionality, and the theme design needs to be updated to accommodate the core and plugin updates.

It is important that your site is up to date, predominantly for security reasons. If your site gets hacked, Google may remove you from the search results and your brand can become damaged. Keeping your site in good condition gives a better user experience and Google prefers sites that work. Updating WordPress keeps your website bug-free and adds features.

Updating the core CMS and plugins can be done from the admin dashboard. Updating a theme is more difficult. Simply clicking ‘update’ can sometimes break functionality. This is because the WP core system, the plugins and the theme/design all need to be in sync together. If something is updated and the other part is not updated, it will break.  We have robust backups in place before an update. If it doesn’t play ball, we fix there and then, and test. We also are alerted to imminent WordPress security threats and take action as necessary. To top this off, we add other features listed below based on your plan