When it comes to WordPress Maintenance, it’s not really a question of IF it needs to be done, but HOW.
I’m not being dramatic, I’ve seen what happens to a beautiful site that isn’t maintained and it’s not pretty. Or cheap to fix.
If you want to know why WordPress Maintenance is so important, read this!
You have two options when it comes to maintaining your WordPress site. You can outsource it, or you can do it yourself.
Should you outsource WordPress Maintenance?
As a web developer, I recommend outsourcing to anyone who falls into one of the following caterogies:
- Anyone who isn’t comfortable with the tasks necessary, and does not want to take the time to learn them
- Anyone who considers themselves to be “the opposite of tech savvy” or who gets easily overwhelmed when something on their website gets wonky or breaks
- Anyone who has a full schedule and can make more money just doing what they love/are good at
- Anyone who has attempted to perform WordPress Maintenance themselves, but for one reason or another wasn’t getting it done
- Anyone who just doesn’t want to do it, because they have things they value more that they’d rather be doing.
Why do I recommend that these people outsource their WordPress Maintenance?
Well for starters, if you’re not comfortable performing the tasks necessary or learning how to do them, you won’t be able to perform them properly. This leads to unnecessary stress and a decent chance of having to pay someone to clean up the mess later (and that usually costs wayyyy more than a regular maintenanace plan).
Second, if you’re too busy to do it, forget to get it done, or you have things you’d rather be doing, you’re probably not going to get it done. Again… unnecessary stress and a decent chance you’re going to have to pay someone to clean up the mess later.
As a web developer, I always stress the importantce of setting up a regular maintenance schedule or outsourcing WordPress maintenance all together.
Why? Because I’ve received my fair share of emails over the years from clients who failed to do so and regretted it.
Here are just a few snippets:
My website is completely down and my host says it's a critical error in my theme. Something about line 13 in my php. Can you fix this?
My website is really slow and the formatting is messed up. A friend ran a sitespeed test and said it's taking 38 seconds to load. What can we do?"
I finally did maintenance on my site last night and now my podcasts aren't loading correctly. This is why I hate doing updates!
Can I please get your maintenance plan pricing?
None of these clients did anything “wrong”. In fact, two of them had full builds done and their developers never told them about maintenanace at all. They were shocked to find out they should have been maintaining their site all along. But regardless of fault, or what happened, what was clear was that they needed someone to maintain their site for them and ultimately choose to outsource.
Should you perform WordPress Maintenance yourself?
There is nothing inherently wrong with taking WordPress maintenance into your own hands. In fact, many of my tech savvy clients do it without any major issues.
Professionally, I think that as long as you are comfortable with all of the maintenance responsibilities, can do it at least once a month and know how to problem solve if something goes wrong, it’s an option. That said, if this isn’t you… I highly recommend you save yourself the stress ahead of time and outsource WordPress maintenance to a trusted professional.
If you’re not sure what the necessary tasks of WordPress maintanance are, you can click here to download a copy of our WordPress Maintanance Guide!
