How WordPress Maintenance Services can Manage Your Website Better

More than 30 percent of the world’s websites are powered by WordPress. These websites deal in different business models from selling merchandise like online stores, selling courses, event booking to supplying support like subscription-based membership websites.

While these entrepreneurs work on their products building their businesses and working hard on their website and marketing, there is a lot of work required in maintaining the website. WordPress Maintenance Services can help you in getting your website live and face the challenges of real-world. So what do these WordPress maintenance service providers actually do for your site?

8 Reasons Why You Need To Hire A WordPress Maintenance Service Provider

• Performance: A website’s performance is the most important part of its growth. Maintenance providers manage a checklist of tasks needed to be done to improve the performance of your website on a daily basis.
• Security: Securing your website from outside threats such as hacking has many faces which maintenance services can easily detect and treat. Through their security measures, they are able to safeguard the customers.
• Regular Backups: If your website gets infected by malware, you start losing data. You may even lose your entire data but maintenance providers will perform routine backups so they can recover your website when such situations arise.
• Uptime Monitoring: Sometimes a website may be down and the website owners might remain unaware of the situation. Maintenance services keep regular checks on the possible downtime a website might have and promptly resolve the issue
• SEO: An updated, optimized and secure website will always rank higher on search engines. WordPress maintenance services help in improving a website’s SEO by completing different tasks related to performance and security while also making sure the site remains up to date.
• Regular Updates: To stay protected a Maintenance Service will regularly update your website. These updates include the updating of WordPress core, WordPress plugins, and themes.
• Website Edits: Maintenance services offer the facility of completing small tasks which a website owner may find too cumbersome to finish. These tasks may include fixing minor bugs and adding provided text or images.
• Support: Maintenance Service Providers are the best people to support and resolve miscellaneous bugs fixes and server issues as they arise.  Customers can email or direct message them to get support.

You can always set up your own website and install the necessary plugins to make it perform sufficiently. However, running and maintaining your website is not a one time task. WordPress maintenance services provide a diverse range of services that help to regularly maintain your website and have it perform optimally.

Performance

Performance is one of the most important factors for a website to grow. While there are many plugins that help to improve the page speed of a site to some extent. But a maintenance provider will use a number of methods to boost the overall performance of your website. Some of the techniques include:

• Gzip is a method of compressing and decompressing files.
• Minification removes redundant data from CSS, HTML and JavaScript files.
• Fixing renders blocking CSS and JavaScripts which block the execution of the rest of the HTML page until they are loaded.
• Image optimization decreases the file size of the image and changes format based on the usage of the page.
• Content Delivery Network (CDN) stores static data of your website such as images and CSS/Javascript files on geographically dispersed servers throughout the world.
• Database optimization of your website to clean up useless data accumulated through time.
• Leveraging Browser cache means the storing of static files on your device which could be reused while loading a web page.

Security

A WordPress maintenance service will not only configure and install the best security plugin available for your website but will also take a number of security measures to further fortify your site. These measures include:

• Implementing SSL certification. (SSL) is a standard security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a server and a client.
• Creating Strong Passwords by using a two-step format of encryption.
• IP Blocking is implemented when unusual traffic is detected such as abnormally high URL requests as this may indicate a brute force attack.
• Malware scanning of content on a daily basis to avoid any threats.
• Making Cloud Backups of your database and files and storing them on a separate secure cloud location.
• Software Updates of WordPress core, theme and plugin versions.
• Using File Permissions which provide a way of controlling whether other people can read (or even modify) your files.
• Spam Filtering user-generated data because spam content may contain malicious links.

BackUps

You can set up to automatically backup your data through a range backup plugins available in the market. But what these plugins won’t tell you is whether these backups are properly working or not.

Maintenance services focus on checking whether the backups made by the plugins are working or not. In case you lose your website data accidentally due to any reason, be it a database crash, hardware failure or a mischievous plugin, it becomes the job of the maintenance service to get the website up and running again.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) affects the online visibility of a website on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Many WordPress websites are unable to reach their highest ranking on these engines. But badly implemented on-page SEO isn’t always the cause of a lower ranking.  Google will also lower rankings of badly performing and insecure websites.

Now, most maintenance services may not directly optimize on-page SEO of a site. But they do improve aspects such as making a website malware and virus free, increasing the overall page speed and keeping the site updated and bug-free. By keeping the website fast, well performing and secure maintenance services naturally help raise its ranking on search engines.

Regular Updates

Newer versions of the WordPress core, themes and plugins get regularly released. But these version updates may not always properly function from the first launch. Some may even cause the existing components of your WordPress website to malfunction or just downright crash.

WordPress maintenance services will keep a check on all the available updates and install them on your website after insuring they are safe to run. They keep backups of older versions so if any new update causes an issue, there would always be a safer version in the backups to revert back to.

Website Edits

Website Edits is a special feature that maintenance Services provide to their customers. These edits consist of small jobs such as changing some text of a page or logo/image which the owners provide. Adding a product to the store or adding a blog post with provided content. Fixing minor bugs as long as they can be completed within 30 minutes.

These small jobs do tend to weigh down in the long run for any online business. Many maintenance services offer the facility of unlimited edits where website owners can have as many minor tasks completed as they require.

Support

WordPress websites are of different business formats, some sell products and others provide services. But every online business that provides services needs an able and proactive customer support team to keep their customers satisfied.

Maintenance providers are there 24/7 for their customers. Many technical issues can arise, which the owner has no knowledge of. Thus, they contact the maintenance service, who are always prepared to resolve their issues.

Some Extra Perks

Apart from managing and maintaining websites, Maintenance Services also provide other benefits. They offer value added services such as providing a number of premium plugins and services completely free of charge. And as a gesture of complete transparency, maintenance services provide weekly and monthly reports detailing the work done on the website.

Premium Plugins   

To add a number of functionalities on your WordPress website there are plugins. WordPress Maintenance services provide many free and premium plugins if you subscribe to their packages. Many of the best plugins cost more than 100 dollars which they provide for free.

They even set up and configure the plugins provided in their support plans. So a WordPress website owner is able to avail many services and save money in the process.

Reports

Weekly and monthly reports are crucial to promote a culture of accountability. WordPress maintenance services provide these reports based on the collective maintenance done by them in the given week or month. Website owners understand more easily how their website is working through these reports. These reports identify what other steps should they take to improve their website.

Weekly reports show a detailed analysis of how many times the website suffered from downtime, the number of backups done, views on the website etc. The report also shows any security threat which the maintenance service cleared as well as the speed of the website.

Conclusion

WordPress Maintenance Services are there to assist and guide the website owners. An entrepreneur needs a good team, they cannot do everything by themselves. These services are a means of saving time and if you have selected a good maintenance service then you definitely save money too.

How do we know that a particular maintenance service is good for us? Look at their support plans, are they beneficial for your website or are they costly and ineffective? Maintenance services can prove to be an important part for a website to run smoothly.

Even if you are a new WordPress user or a veteran with a running online business, you should consider hiring a WordPress maintenance and support service. They might just prove to be the catalyst you’re searching for to take your business to the next level.

If you enjoyed the blog and any of the given detail was helpful please let us know and don’t forget to check out our services on wpengineers.com. We provide WordPress website support and maintenance services.