Websites built in WordPress need to be maintained regularly

Purpose of this article: If you own or manage a website built in Wordpress, it needs to be regularly maintained and its plugins updated to avoid compromise.

Many business owners believe that once you build a WordPress website, you kind of “set it and forget it”. Imagine if you planted a garden and never watered it or pulled out the weeds. What would happen? Right, it would probably not flourish and it certainly wouldn’t do well.

So with WordPress sites, a lot of business owners don’t realize that the core software and plugins used to customize the website need to be updated on a frequent basis. 

When you leave these things unattended, your website becomes vulnerable to attack. Hackers could break in and take advantage of your site, holding it hostage, inserting malicious links, or hijacking the processors. 

Website visitors may experience the big red screen of death and then they’re hitting the back button never to interact with your website. Search engines may also flag you for malicious content, which can cause long-term damage to your search result ranking, a hole that’s difficult and time-consuming to crawl out of (pun intended). 

What you need to do is create a preventative maintenance plan, where you’re logging in once a month, or ideally, once a week to ensure these updates happen. Add a recurring, one-hour event to your calendar as a reminder. 

However, before you can make these updates you HAVE to create a backup of the website. There’s always the chance that something will go terribly wrong during the update. The last thing you want is to make that update and then see that the site isn’t showing up at all, which is a very frightening and not-so-great feeling.  You need to be able to restore the website to its prior state. Once you have it restored, you have to figure out why the update didn’t work properly. 

Smart Sourced IT partners with Smack Happy Design for website design, maintenance, and security.  Book a complimentary assessment with Nicole Hanusek, and tell her Smart Sourced IT sent you.