An introduction to website maintenance

Once your website is live, it’s tempting to think the hard work is over. In reality, it’s only the beginning, and finding the time for website maintenance should be a key part of your regular routine. This is true whether you have a brand new website or an old one languishing in the back of the store cupboard.

This guide will highlight the importance of keeping your website updated with the latest software releases, ensuring the security and integrity of your site. It will also show how keeping content fresh and updated can increase your website’s visibility and how regular maintenance improves overall performance.

The key points covered include disaster recovery strategies, updating software, website security routines, improving performance and content updates.

But firstly, why does all this matter?

A website is never really finished. Technology changes constantly, software developers release regular security patches and search engines favour websites that remain active and well maintained. Ignoring website maintenance may not cause immediate problems, but issues tend to build up over time. A website that isn’t updated becomes more vulnerable to security attacks, performance can gradually deteriorate and compatibility problems can arise as hosting environments evolve. Left long enough, even a simple software update can become a major project.

Regular maintenance is rather like servicing a car. A little attention carried out consistently is far cheaper and less stressful than dealing with a major failure. It protects your investment, keeps your website running smoothly and allows you to concentrate on running your business rather than fixing technical problems.

Backups and disaster recovery

Your website’s hosting provider is likely to have its own backup facilities. This is standard on the hosting platform we use for our clients, but it is not true for every provider. The provider will often store the files and database on the same server as your website. While this is good enough for restoring minor hiccups, it will not help if there is a catastrophic issue with the server.

In this worst case scenario, the backups may be unrecoverable and you will lose your website completely. A safer approach is to store a regular copy of your website ‘off-site’ – in other words, on a completely different server. This will mean that in the very rare cases of disaster at the data centre, you will always be able to recover your site.

Whichever backup strategy you choose, it is also worth periodically testing that your backups can actually be restored. A backup is only valuable if it works when you need it.

Software updates

A WordPress website is constructed using three main software components: WordPress itself, the theme that controls the overall design and plugins that add additional functionality such as contact forms, ecommerce or SEO tools.

Each of these require maintenance as most vendors will release regular upgrades to their software. New versions typically include security patches, bug fixes, performance improvements and occasionally, new features. It is highly recommended to keep up with these updates and WordPress will check automatically and can notify you of any updates that are available.

It’s a straightforward process to perform updates via the WordPress Dashboard but there are pitfalls to watch out for. Plugins can sometimes conflict with each other or the theme after an update and these need to be identified and resolved should issues arise. For instance, you may notice a specific function will stop working or in worse case scenarios, the site will stop working completely.

Despite this drawback, overlooking updates increases the risk of security issues opening up as well as incompatibilities with server environments arising. The longer updates are ignored, the higher the level of risk accumulates.

It is also important to keep your hosting environment up to date. Modern versions of PHP generally offer better security and improved performance, although major version upgrades should always be tested for compatibility.

Security

As well as keeping software up to date, it is best practice to install a plugin to harden the overall security of the website. Plugins such as Wordfence or Kadence Security have a host of options for this including Two-factor authentication (2FA), SSL enforcement, web application firewalls, login restrictions and disabling WordPress features that reveal unnecessary details about your site.

They should also be set up to regularly perform automated site scans to check for vulnerabilities in installed software, notifying you if any are found. In Kadence Security, software is checked through Patchstack vulnerability mitigation services.

Strong passwords and two-factor authentication remain among the simplest and most effective ways of protecting your website from unauthorised access.

Performance

Over time, the database that runs under the hood of your site can become bloated and full of unnecessary information. This can adversely impact the speed and performance of your website. In addition, the theme and plugin files can add additional load on server resources, slowing your website down.

You can check your site’s speed by using services such as GTmetrix or PageSpeed Insights to analyse your website, diagnose performance issues and provide feedback on how to optimise performance for both mobile and desktop users.

Simplifying your requirements by keeping plugin installations at a minimum can improve your performance score. Paradoxically, this is also where an additional plugin can come to your aid and software such as Hummingbird or W3 Total Cache provide tools to enable database optimisation, Gzip compression, script minifying and delivery of static HTML files of your dynamic WordPress site, bypassing slower database connections and queries.

Large image files can significantly slow your website down, so be sure to optimise your images before upload. If you have a lot of very large images in your media library, plugins such as Smush can help with the task of optimising and re-saving images already in use.

If your audience is spread across the country or around the world, using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) can also improve loading times by serving files from servers closer to each visitor.

Don’t forget content

In addition to the rather dry and technical tasks outlined above, don’t forget about adding new content for your site. This is arguably one of the most important ongoing website maintenance jobs and one that you are uniquely qualified to do as a business owner or marketing professional. Luckily WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems (CMS) out there so there is no excuse but to dive in and add new pages or posts.

Even if you have no technical or design experience, your website designer should have created templates that make adding new content straightforward while ensuring it looks great on desktops, tablets and mobile devices.

If this is not the case or you are not comfortable using the layout tools provided by WordPress, it’s advisable to outsource this work to a professional web designer. This is especially true where the design and layout of visually appealing landing pages for your products and services is a key requirement.

Don’t just add new pages. Refreshing existing content with current information, new photographs and updated services is equally valuable and signals that your business remains active.

Our approach

Our approach to supporting clients with ongoing maintenance is twofold: to set up and configure systems that provide automated tools handling the technical work along with the allocation of a monthly schedule for personal, hands-on time to devote to your website’s health, security and performance.

Our Care Plan packages handle the day to day work for you, providing the reassurance that the technical details are covered and a web design professional is looking after your website’s long-term reliability.