Why websites need maintenance

There are 3 main issues to worry about when your site isn’t kept up-to-date:

1. Security: just like on your mobile phone, plugin updates include security patches. Leaving plugins out-of-date can lead to security vulnerabilities that leave you open to hackers.
2. Functionality fails: if the site is left just sitting there, eventually some of the components will stop working. If this isn’t maintained regularly, the failure could go unnoticed for a long period of time, possibly losing you credibility, trust and  sales. 
3. Expensive fixes: when you do finally get around to updating your site after a long period of time between updates, you are at a high risk of running into plugin conflicts and technical problems that will be time consuming (and costly) to resolve. Most people will have experienced a similar issue with a phone or computer — if you ignore the updates it eventually dies on you.

Yes! You absolutely can! Go into your site every month and update each plugin one at a time. Check your site for any problems between each plugin update. We recommend updating all plugins on a staging site to be sure that any conflicts during updates don’t affect the live site. You can then push the staging site to live once you know everything is working properly. You’ll also need to update your site theme, and the WordPress core. Again, check for any functionality or display problems between each update so you know what action caused the problem if something goes wrong. Then you’ll need to troubleshoot the problem to resolve it.

Maintenance in this realm doesn’t refer to adding new content to the site or changing the way things look (although you can book a Clever Day for that). Website care is the basics of keeping your site alive and functional so your business can operate effectively. 

All of our updates are managed via the staging site, so your live site will never be impacted by a plugin conflict, giving us time to fix the issue in test mode before we push the updates live.

Each month, we go deep with AI regression testing for code inconsistencies down to the pixel. So we are aware of every issue and can pinpoint precisely where problems are occurring.

If a plugin suddenly isn’t compatible, we’ll liaise with the plugin developer on your behalf. In most cases, the plugin developer will resolve the issue. In the event that additional work is required by us to help fix the problem, we’ll liaise with you regarding the best and most economical solution for your setup.