Why is it important to maintain my WordPress website?

Some people think that once you have created a website then that’s the job done. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Getting your site online is one thing, but keeping it there, and keeping it safe is quite another.

WordPress website maintenance is extremely important. In fact, keeping your WordPress healthy, safe, optimised and error-free, is essential if you want to keep your visitors and search engines happy.

There are a lot of things that go into creating a website, and they change frequently. A WordPress website has many different parts and if these become too outdated, it can affect many of them.

Security

Websites do get hacked, and if it hasn’t happened to you yet, then you have probably been lucky. Hackers pay no attention to how big your website or your company are, and a poorly maintained website leaves you open to security breaches.

Keeping plugins and themes up to date should be a minimum. Maintenance doesn’t stop there though. There are many other things that can be done to keep the site secure from attackers.

Website security is – quite simply – about risk reduction.

Speed

As with any filing system, the files and folders on your WordPress website can become cluttered. The underlying code needs to be tidied up every now and then as well as your database, which will accumulate a lot of unnecessary information which can slow your website significantly.

SEO performance

Customers are not the only visitors to your website. There are other things crawling around your website, which we call website crawlers. These crawlers can promote or – regrettably – bury your business into the ground.

In a nutshell – Google analyses your website with the help of its Google bots. These Google bots look for key items of information that signal to Google the value of your website. Google will be analysing your website’s keyword optimisation, your site’s structure and organisation, and – likely site errors.

Search engines prefer sites that are fast, error free and well maintained. If it isn’t the case, then your website will fall further and further down the rankings.

Searchengines prefer sites that are fast, error free and well maintained. If it isn’t the case, then your website will fall further and further down the rankings.

What is likely to happen if I don’t maintain it properly?

If you don’t maintain your website properly, you are risk all sorts of vulnerability and functionality problems.

The possible major consequences are:

• Code conflicts resulting in
  • Break of design
  • Numerous functionality issues
• Vulnerability to hacker attacks
• Slow load time

• Decreased search engine rankings

Broken or offline sites cost money, especially if you are selling products or services through it. The chances of this happening with professional maintenance are very low.