What could happen to my WordPress site if I don’t maintain it regularly?

If you’re looking for a cost-effective, simple way to create your own website, WordPress is a popular, open-source content-management system powering over 43% of the internet’s sites.

Initially devised to publish blogs, it’s developed significantly to now support publishing other web content. You don’t need any coding experience to get started, plus it’s user-friendly and free to use. Equally, it can grow with your business as your needs change.

However, low maintenance doesn’t mean zero upkeep, and you’ll still need to update and maintain your website regularly. Here’s what can happen if you don’t:

1. Functionality
Links and web forms need to operate flawlessly. Broken links, for example, can affect your standing with the major search engines. Equally, you don’t want to frustrate visitors with below-par functionality or send them down dead ends. What’s more, a slow-loading website can cause huge problems, both from an SEO point of view and because it will exasperate existing and potential customers. At worst, you could lose them completely.

2. Appearance
If you carry out enough regular maintenance, you’ll help to keep everything functioning and looking as it ought to. Otherwise, your site can start to look dated, and web users will simply click on your competitors’ sites instead.

3. Security threats
While the vast majority of WP sites enjoy a high level of security, you can significantly reduce the risk of hackers striking with regular updates. Indeed, WordPress issues a minor update every week or two. These releases come about after WordPress has learned of security flaws in previous iterations which hackers could have exploited. Updates fix security bugs and glitches swiftly for enhanced security.

A good hosting service will help you to maintain security, too, while other services and tools also add layers of defence.

You may think you’re less vulnerable to hackers if you’re a smaller business, but you’re not. So don’t place your customer data at risk or leave yourself open to hackers stealing your data or your customers’.

4. Slows down developers
If a developer is working on your WP site and is held up because you haven’t updated it for months, they’ll need to update everything before they can do anything else.

Checklist of WordPress routine maintenance tasks

Here are some of the key things to keep an eye on:

1. Have a disaster recovery plan in place
This isn’t nearly as extreme as it may sound. And not only is it important, it’s very simple to do; it just means having a regular back-up of your WP site, which you can update weekly or even daily. This gives you peace of mind that your site won’t be down for very long should the worst happen.

2. Testing … testing
This should be a vital element of your regular WP maintenance schedule. Check your site’s functionality across multiple devices. Test links and web forms as well as any other issues, and assess loading times.

One tool you could use is Google’s PageSpeed Insights, which monitors performance against benchmarks.

3. Status alerts
If your website goes down, don’t hear about this from an annoyed customer. In truth, there are various reasons a site can crash with no advance warning. There are tools and monitoring software to help notify you of any problems, allowing you to fix them ASAP and limit potential damage.

4. Patches and updates
Most of us update our digital devices without thinking twice about it, and the same principle applies to WP websites. Your regular schedule should include theme and plug-in updates, plus those for WordPress itself. Don’t stick to older versions which could pose security hazards or affect performance.

Plug-ins are the software add-ons which you can download and install to a WP site to improve or add to its functionality. (They’re not unlike smartphone apps, and offer numerous different options for your website.)

But don’t get into a situation where you can’t install or use these plug-ins because they’re not compatible with the version of WordPress you have.

At the same time, you won’t want to miss out on any new features which WordPress may introduce.

5. Decluttering
This is another key element of WordPress upkeep. Delete or update old content frequently, so that everything stays relevant and you remain in favour with the big search engines like Google.

WordPress maintenance from SWSweb

At SWSweb, we’ve been providing website support to all sorts of organisations since 2012. We specialise in WordPress and Joomla, although we work with other systems, too. We offer three packages for WordPress maintenance – Essential, Pro and Dedicated – along with high-quality design and development and hosting.

Talk to us today about how we could take care of regular maintenance of your site – so you don’t have to.