Sometimes things break.
Just like the delicate inner mechanisms of a fine watch, there are a lot of different moving parts in a website. Tweak this one thing over here and that thing over there suddenly spits out an error.
If you’ve invested in an incredible website that really connects with your customers, the last thing you want is to deal with downtime and bugs.
After all, websites don’t get to take sick leave like the rest of us.
A maintenance program helps to proactively identify and deal with the chief reasons why your WordPress website might be a bit under the weather.
But what’s going on behind the scenes with web maintenance? What does it actually cover?
Let’s take a look:
Security & Bug Fixes in WordPress Core and Plugins
This might come as a surprise, but not everyone on the internet has your best interests at heart. Some people look for security vulnerabilities to exploit so they can make a quick buck or gain access to your system for future malevolence.
And then there’s always some people who just want to watch the world burn.
52% of reported WordPress security vulnerabilities are due to out-of-date or unverified WordPress plugins. Fortunately, staying on top of fixes in both the WordPress core and your installed plugins goes a long way to keeping these miscreants at bay. WordPress developers are constantly monitoring and working with their existing code to make sure the security is airtight. If they discover a weakness, they’ll make an update.
Performing these updates for your site as soon as possible is important, since anyone with sinister intentions may already have the blueprint for exploiting your site.
New Features & Performance Enhancements in WordPress Core and Plugins
The internet is always in motion. Without devoting some attention to updates, you can miss out on some important new features and enhancements that can benefit your site.
A maintenance program is useful for keeping you informed about any new features or functionality that you can leverage to improve the experience for your visitors.
Reducing chances of incompatibility between the WordPress Core, Plugins and External Services
Sometimes an update means that parts of your website don’t want to talk to each other anymore. This kind of communication breakdown can wreak havoc on your site’s functionality.
Any unexpected changes can break the link for any kind of API (application programming interface) that has been built for your website to allow for custom functionality with external software.
Anticipating and proactively responding to incompatibility issues between WordPress and your plugins keep everything running smoothly.
Testing updates to make everything is compatible and that your website is performing its best
For all of these updates, there’s a whole lot more than just clicking the “Update” button and hoping for the best. As we’ve read, sometimes updating everything to make sure nothing breaks causes something else to break. This is often due to an incompatibility between the new version of WordPress and a plugin that needs to update their tool.
A maintenance program means we dig into any incompatibility issues and make sure everything is A-OK before we roll it out, preventing unnecessary and costly downtime and stress.
