Reading Time: 3 minutes

Your Orlando WordPress website should be ever-changing (and updating!). Here’s why we highly recommend choosing a maintenance plan for your online showcase.

The days of Yellow Pages are over. The phone book arrived at our office last week and Maddie came to my office and said, “Do you want this?” I asked what it was (it had a big photo of UCF on the front) and she said with a chuckle, “It’s the phone book!” I thanked her but asked her to add it to our recycling pile.

And I bet that’s what a TON of other people do. Why? Because the phone book is outdated and it didn’t evolve and so now, as Kevin O’Leary often exclaims, “It’s dead to me!”

Nowadays, what do people do? They Google something. “To Google” is now a verb. People are Googling something that didn’t even exist on something that wasn’t even mainstream 20 years ago. Which leads me to websites.

Websites are the go-to for people to do research, explore, learn and trust the company or product they’re considering. So, guess what comes with that? Making sure your website is FRESH and working like a well-oiled machine.

In order to do that, you need a couple of things on a monthly basis for your Orlando WordPress website maintenance plan:

• Backups
• WordPress core updates
• Plugin updates
• Maintenance on the site itself
• Monitoring if it does go down
• Hosting help

Some people don’t think they need WordPress updates but I have a story or two that will convince you otherwise. Here we go.

Case 1: The Reason You Need Monthly Orlando WordPress Website Maintenance

We had a client who had been in their industry for over 15 years. They had someone build them a website and everything was great. They were coming up in search results organically (no money paid) and they were getting leads in from online.

Then their website was hacked and it crashed. It crashed and they didn’t have a backup. Which means… they.lost.everything!!!

Now picture this, you’ve built up this amazing following, you have a solid spot on Google AND you’re getting leads in from online.

Then it disappears. Because you didn’t have a backup.

Now, you have to start all over. No photos, no content, nothing. Painful!

Moral Of The Story:

If this company would have paid a marketer or webmaster each month, they would have ensured your website was backed up so if this did happen, they could resolve it and reinstate it as if the hacking itself (in some cases) had never occurred.

Case 2: The Reason You Need Monthly Orlando WordPress Website Maintenance

One morning our email kept dinging us and letting us know that a client’s website kept going up and then back down again. Sometimes for even 15 minutes at a time.

In the web world, that’s an eternity, especially since people’s attention spans are even shorter than a goldfish itself!

We looked into it and confirmed it was her hosting site. We highly recommend WPEngine over other hosting sites because it’s geared towards WordPress sites. We’ve tested it against others and it tends to be much faster too.

She wasn’t on one that we recommended and for whatever reason, it wasn’t stabilizing her website so it went up and down multiple times.

We were able to be proactive and let her know that this was happening, found a solution within the hour that she contracted with us and then recommended she migrate over to another hosting platform.

She agreed and we haven’t had the issue since.

Moral Of The Story

Don’t discount “you get what you pay for.” I used that initial hosting platform when I first started and it was so frustrating, I migrated my site over to two separate ones until I found WP Engine.

Case 3: The Reason You Need Monthly Orlando WordPress Website Maintenance

A client came to us and wanted someone taken off their website because they no longer worked there. It wasn’t a terrible break-up but they wanted them down as soon as possible.

Their employees do go out and meet customers on the company’s behalf and so it was important to them to keep the website updated so the customers knew who to expect if they were coming out to their homes.

The reason this particular company called us was because they couldn’t do it themselves, not because they weren’t able, but because they didn’t have time.

We had the edit done within 1 day and the client was happy because it was updated and fresh showcasing their other employees.

Moral Of The Story

Not every edit needs to be complicated for a web development or marketing company to help with it. We do small edits all the time and the thing is, we save customers time. They can rely on us and we can let them know it was done in a timely manner.

When it comes to your Orlando WordPress website maintenance make sure you vet the people and ask them how many clients they’re currently working with. Ask them how they can help and make sure you get a list of bulleted points as to what they’ll be doing for you each month.

If you have any questions about how we can help you with your monthly website maintenance, fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch!