Building a WordPress website is relatively simple and can offer a sense of achievement when a business or individual successfully launches their website. However, for many people and businesses, the focus ends up shifting from the website as time goes by. The website ends up sitting for months or years before being looked at again. Although this can be okay in some specific cases, it is not okay in a majority of cases. Having a WordPress maintenance plan is very important and we are going to look at why this is so in this article.

Hackers are Everywhere

WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world. Because it is so popular and powers so many websites, it is a potent target for hackers and malicious third-party actors. Hackers can exploit bugs and vulnerabilities in themes and plugins and end up gaining access to your website.

Fortunately, WordPress is aware of these issues and releases patches and fixes regularly. They also release fixes quickly once security threats are detected. Having a maintenance plan gives you the best chance of having the latest security fixes installed on your website.

Not Maintaining Your Website Can Cost You

Allowing your WordPress website to become outdated and slow can lead to people not visiting your website anymore. This can lead to fewer site visits and less brand recognition, and can end up costing your business a lot of money. The security vulnerabilities we talked about above take a few seconds to minutes to patch while the PR nightmare that comes with having your website hacked or data stolen could take months or years to repair. This could end up costing your business a lot and there have been instances where businesses have been decimated due to a data breach. 

Updating your website, running scans, checking for vulnerabilities, and installing patching and updates should all be added to your WordPress hosting maintenance checklist. This will give you a schedule for when to check and deal with these issues before they become bigger issues and end up costing you.

Backups are Crucial

Almost all security breaches lead to data loss while malware leads to an inability to use your website or a degraded user experience. By not having a maintenance plan that includes updating your website, businesses risk losing some or all of their data.

Even with such protections in place, businesses have to think about data loss due to software or hardware issues, human errors, or database issues. This is where backups come in. It would be costly, time-consuming, and frustrating to build everything as it was before. Without a website to direct customers to, or another platform to use to keep the business going, a business can end up losing everything.

A backup makes it easy to get the site up and running after checking everything else is fine. Businesses can also add automated backups to their maintenance plans so they can have some reprieve should something happen to their website or infrastructure.

Having a WordPress maintenance plan is crucial as it helps you avoid many of the problems associated with running a WordPress website. It also helps put protections in place that will help if something happens to your website. All businesses should have a WordPress maintenance plan and adhere to it strictly.