A strong online presence starts with a fast and reliable website, but how do you ensure your site provides an exceptional user experience? Thanks to its flexibility and customizability, for many businesses, the answer is WordPress.
However, while this content management system (CMS) streamlines your website’s design and operation, it’s still not a complete set-it-and-forget-it solution. Take advantage of a WordPress maintenance plan, though, and you can focus more time and energy on business growth. Here’s how.
What Are WordPress Website Maintenance Packages?
WordPress’s power and customizability come from its many themes, tools, and plugins, but all these components need regular updates. You also need to constantly monitor uptime, malware, malicious login attempts, and many other things. WordPress website maintenance packages provide comprehensive coverage of this by handling:
- Regular plugin, theme, and core file updates with compatibility testing to keep your site running smoothly.
- Automated backups and file storage to keep your content safe.
- Security monitoring and real-time malware protection to prevent security issues.
- Performance optimization to help your site run faster.
Plans often include uptime monitoring and 24/7 emergency support, so they inform you when your site goes down and can help you get things back online. WordPress maintenance packages also often make technical search engine optimization (SEO) easier by detecting broken links and other issues as they arise.
Why Your Business Needs a WordPress Maintenance Plan
Businesses spend lots of time agonizing over website maintenance checklists — time they could invest in marketing or customer service for better returns. This alone is a great reason to consider a WordPress maintenance package, but there are many other benefits.
1. Enhanced Security Measures
WordPress is one of the most popular and dependable content management systems. Despite over 40% of websites using WordPress, the CMS experiences very few security vulnerabilities each year. However, the period of highest risk for your business is the window between when a security threat first arises and the release of a patch.
The real-time security monitoring offered by many WordPress website maintenance plans protects you against both known and unknown vulnerabilities, periodically checking for:
- Hack attempts.
- Brute-force logins.
- Malicious code injection.
- User data breaches.
- Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
- Malware infections.
- Plugin and theme issues.
Maintenance plans also handle updates for you, applying them as they are released and testing for site stability afterward. As plugins are the source of around 93% of WordPress security vulnerabilities, these updates are essential for protecting your business and its customers.
2. Improved Website Performance
Website performance used to be somewhat of an afterthought for many businesses until successive Google updates penalized slow, clunky sites. Even without considering the impact on search rankings, you’d still want a fast site and flawless user experience (UX). That’s because bounce rate probability jumps by 32% as page load times increase from just one to three seconds.
WP maintenance packages help ensure your site runs quickly and smoothly to improve the user experience and maximize traffic and conversions. They do this by running performance audits and implementing optimizations based on what they find. Some of the most crucial optimizations include:
- Image formatting, compression, and delivery.
- Database cleanup.
- Cache management.
- Content delivery network (CDN) configuration.
- Code minification.
- Mobile performance tuning.
If implemented incorrectly, these complex optimizations can cause your site to break, but a managed service offers a stress-free route to a high-performing UX.
3. Regular Backups
Significant data loss can be catastrophic, even leading companies to go bankrupt. However, smaller-scale losses can also bring your business to a standstill. Imagine losing your recent order history or three months of blog posts due to a server crash!
Backups are the best way to avoid data loss, but many businesses don’t create them frequently enough to avoid operational disruptions. Worse still, backups can become corrupt, preventing them from working, and you may not realize this has happened until it’s too late.
Fortunately, backup management is another service integral to WordPress care plans. Your maintenance package provider will create backups for you, test them frequently, and handle the entire restoration process when data loss occurs.
4. Updated Plugins and Themes
Businesses running WordPress typically use about 20 to 30 plugins for basic website functionality. This number increases if you need more extensive ecommerce management or custom features such as membership portals and booking systems.
When you consider that a single popular plugin receives up to 50 updates a year, it’s clear that update management can become time-consuming and tedious. While you won’t usually need more than two themes — your primary theme and the WordPress default as a backup — these also need updates, and individual theme and plugin updates may conflict, leading to broken features or your whole site going down.
WordPress maintenance plans simplify updates by applying them as needed while testing for compatibility issues. If something breaks, they’ll find a solution to roll back functionality without leaving you vulnerable to security threats in the process.
5. SEO Benefits
Google looks at many ranking factors when deciding how to position your site for business-critical keywords, with loading issues, past security threats, and poor site architecture being some of the worst maintenance-related hindrances to high ranks. As such, both WordPress SEO Services and maintenance packages prioritize these issues alongside other ranking factors.
Ways a WordPress maintenance plan can help with SEO include:
- Creating and updating sitemaps.
- Monitoring for broken links.
- Validating structured data.
- Maintaining a clean, functional database.
- Keeping SEO plugins updated.
- Checking your robots.txt file‘s function.
- Validating mobile friendliness.
- Optimizing images and Core Web Vitals.
These technical SEO optimizations, alongside keyword research, competition analysis, and other strategic efforts, help you grow your business and gain more visibility.
6. Professional Support
Many businesses don’t have the resources to employ a dedicated team to resolve website issues around the clock, but Website Maintenance Services often include professional support. This support can save you hours of downtime and avoid lost sales when your site experiences problems.
While there are standalone support plans you can use, having tech support as part of your maintenance package is simpler. Besides avoiding adding yet another service commitment and cost to manage, it ensures support has detailed access to your site’s code, architecture, backups, and update history to enable rapid troubleshooting.
7. Cost-Effective Maintenance
Maintenance packages cover the most tedious daily, weekly, and monthly tasks within a WordPress maintenance checklist. This frees up time you can invest into perfecting your site’s user experience, optimizing your landing pages, and researching your competition.
However, it’s not just about getting better returns on available time. Regular maintenance is also essential for preventing some of the most costly and devastating issues businesses face online.
Take security breaches and data loss, for example. Even smaller issues can lead to significant losses, though, as emergency developer rates can be two or three times the standard cost. Maintenance plans offer an economical solution for avoiding these unexpected expenses.
The Impact of WordPress Maintenance Packages on Business Growth
Investing in WordPress maintenance plans delivers clear benefits that help speed up your business’ growth trajectory. These include:
- Enhanced customer trust and retention from a streamlined UX.
- Higher conversion rates from better loading times.
- Increased ranking potential from superior site performance and SEO.
- Reduced risk of income loss from better uptime and fewer technical glitches.
- Stronger brand credibility from improved security.
Moreover, maintenance packages free up your team’s time. Instead of fixing glitches and grappling with plugin compatibility, you can devote more attention to developing innovative strategies to expand your customer base.
Choosing the Right WordPress Maintenance Package
When looking for the ideal WP maintenance plan, first consider your website’s characteristics. These include:
- Size.
- Complexity.
- Traffic volume.
Look for packages that can accommodate those characteristics while also offering the most vital maintenance services. Some of the most important include:
- Comprehensive security measures.
- Backup management.
- Active performance optimization.
- Responsive technical support.
- Detailed reporting.
Once you find a package that fits your needs, question the company offering the package about their:
- Backup frequency and process.
- Update testing procedures.
- Use of staging environments.
- Typical contact response time.
- Security monitoring tools.
- Limits on support requests/dev hours.
It’s also essential to read through the contract conditions. Ensure you understand the process for changing or canceling your subscription and what the provider covers as regular maintenance vs. additional services at potential added cost.
Victorious: Your WordPress Partner
Don’t let maintenance issues slow you down. Your website should propel your business forward, but the hours you spend on its maintenance is time you could put to better use, driving growth and customer satisfaction. A maintenance plan from Victorious, a trusted WordPress SEO Agency, is designed to fuel long-term growth by aligning seamlessly with your needs and SEO goals. Book a free consultation today!
