This post was originally published on July 13th, 2017. Updated for August 4th, 2020.
Have you ever wondered why you should have your WordPress website maintained by a professional? One morning at the Technology Aloha office was a great reminder of why we do what we do.
What is Website Maintenance?
Website maintenance is a service offered by web professionals, to take care of your website. Website maintenance usually includes site updates, site backups, security checks, and general site support. You’ll probably sign up for this service through the same company that designs and builds your site. Once your awesome new website is complete and live on the internet, good site maintenance ensures your website stays up to date, healthy, and problem-free.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
You might be thinking, what could really go wrong on my site? Well, unfortunately, there is plenty. One morning we were performing routine updates for our web maintenance clients when a bug in a simple theme update caused 4 websites to completely shut down. As in, no website, no admin access, just an error message and a blank screen of death. Who would have thought that an update from 3.0.61 to 3.0.62 would cause such a mess??
What We Did To Fix The Problem
As soon as the problem occurred, it was all-hands-on-deck to troubleshoot what went wrong and how to fix it. We called the hosting provider to report the problem and see if there was a known issue impacting the sites. After some research, we discovered that a faulty theme update had caused the issue, and came up with a plan to fix the problem on each site. The affected sites did experience some downtime during this process, but all 4 sites were back up and running smoothly within 2 hours at no additional cost to our clients.
What Could Have Happened
Without a professional to take care of the website maintenance, our clients may have found themselves with no website for days until they had the time to figure out a solution. In addition, they may not have had a recent backup of the website on file, in order to restore the damaged site. Without a maintenance plan, these clients would have been looking at paying at least $100 to hire someone to restore the site. Worst case, they may have needed to have the site rebuilt from scratch, which could cost thousands of dollars. We know how busy our clients can be; trying to figure out how to get your website working is the last thing you want to worry about. A site that’s down can cost you time, money, and lost clients, so hiring a professional to do your web maintenance has a pretty clear ROI.
Want to give your website the care it deserves? We offer professional website maintenance packages for all our web design clients. Contact us today to learn more.
Listen to this post on our podcast!
Into the Inbound with Technology Aloha
