Why is WordPress Website Maintenance important?
With roughly 30% of the web being powered by WordPress, regular maintenance is a necessity to keep your site functioning properly. This typically includes WordPress core, theme and plugin updates, as well as testing and backups. A WordPress maintenance plan including regular maintenance is also used to check site health, resolve SEO-related issues and to remove unused content. In many cases, the time and cost to perform maintenance on a weekly basis is minimal.
Being proactive can greatly reduce the following issues:
Software Related Site Damage
Keeping the core WordPress files updated between major releases will ensure your site is functioning and performing as well as possible. When a major core release is rolled out, applying and testing on a development server is key to minimizing/eliminating any update-related downtime due to plugin or custom code incompatibility.
Security Issues
Regular updates to both the WordPress core and plugin files will minimize known security issues, since the developers patch and deploy updates when new vulnerabilities are discovered. We monitor every site we host for plugins with known security issues and update, replace or remove them as needed.
Degraded Performance
When performing maintenance, we search for broken links as well as any poorly performing pages. The elimination of broken links and page speed optimization will benefit your search engine optimization efforts.