When hiring a digital marketing agency to develop and maintain your website it is extremely important to have a long-term site maintenance plan. By simply having the site up and running is not enough. Regularly updating and maintaining your site is crucial to ensuring that your site is running at full capacity. Just like cars, websites require maintenance to operate properly.
Properly maintaining your site helps to ensure site security, increase the number of new visitors, boost returning traffic, and more. While the most obvious risk is having your site hacked, there are smaller scale problems that could arise if you fail to, or even just wait too long, to make site updates.
To help you understand, we’ve outlined below our top 5 pitfalls that could happen if you don’t maintain your websites
1. Getting Hacked
Our top reason is the most evident one: security. Many people think it can’t happen to them because their site is too small. The likelihood of an older site getting hacked is a lot greater due to it having less secure coding and modules that are not up to date. All they have to do is click ‘view page source’ to see what WordPress version you are running. It’s that simple for the hackers to target outdated sites.
2. Risk of Damage to the Integrity of Your Site
The longer you wait, the more risk you have that you will encounter a problem when you finally update your site. The more often you update, the less likely problems will arise. Skipping updates (like 3.0 to 5.0), is a big no-no because eventually, some day you’ll be forced into the new updates. And that one day, your risk is much higher because other modules will be out of date.
3. Wasted Time and Money
When you fail to make updates when they become available, but then need to go back and make them later, it turns into a much larger development and effort. The developer will need to spend much more time making the updates because the impact to the site is greater due to the increased number of updates and module changes over time. The more time spent the more the cost implications.
4. Unusable Features & Poor User Experience
Site updates provide new features and functionality to your website. Why wouldn’t you want new features for your WordPress or Drupal site? The sooner you implement the update, the sooner you get that new functionality. Think of why you always are updating your phone. That is, if you’re using an older version of WordPress, your overall experience is a lot different and often slower than someone using the latest version.
5. Decreased Speed
Each New release comes with various performance improvements that make your website more efficient. When you visit a site, and it takes too long to load – do you get impatient and navigate off? Website performance goes hand-in-hand with conversions and site results.
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