Regular maintenance is crucial to keep any website secure and functioning properly, especially a WordPress site. Don’t get me wrong, here. I love building on WordPress due to the flexibility and nearly limitless options available, but maintenance is key to performance.
Let me give you an example of what can happen when a site is not properly maintained. I am not a “technical” person. So when I started a new job at a non-profit and was given the WordPress website to manage, I was a little apprehensive. While I had built several sites in collaboration with a WordPress colleague, I was still a newbie and really knew next to nothing about it. Now here I was, responsible for this neglected website that had not been updated or maintained for some time. I confronted many glitches, such as a calendar plug-in that wouldn’t move past the previous month. I pleaded with my son (a computer science major) and my colleague at Laren Networks to help, but there was no budget for this help. My colleague and my son helped me as much as possible (out of the goodness of their hearts!) to get the basic things up and running, but it needed regular backups and maintenance.
Our management was not convinced of the value in having technical support to keep up regular maintenance, and did not believe anyone would bother to hack into a small organization’s website. I was tired of begging for free help. So (I think you know where this story is going) one day we were confronted by our own website sporting a banner across the top pitching Viagra with links to rather unsavory sites. And no, I wasn’t working for a pharmaceutical company. We’d been hacked. And why? Because we didn’t have all the updates installed with new security tools to forestall these kinds of attacks. Fortunately, due to the support of my colleague, we had made a recent backup and were able to recover in short order.
The point is, it doesn’t matter whether your site is for a Fortune 500 company or a neighborhood dog walker. While the calculated targeted hacks on Target or Home Depot were planned for massive financial gains, some hackers just do it “for fun.” Others set up automated bots to take over any vulnerable site to get their messages and links out to an unsuspecting audience, using the credibility of your organization for their profit. They don’t care who you are; they will randomly hack any site they can get into, and find it especially easy to hack those which are not updated or maintained.
The good news is, with a WordPress site, you can easily learn to do this regular maintenance yourself, or you can hire someone to make updates and backups on a regular basis and be your ongoing technical support. Other options for those too nervous to delve into WordPress include services like Squarespace, a platform on which you can build a simple site for an annual fee and they take care of security updates and other routine maintenance. It’s a good solution for some smaller organizations. However, there are drawbacks to this option that you should consider before putting all your website eggs in that basket. But more on that later.
Please contact us if have questions or would like to chat about websites and other marketing tools to help your business flourish.
Cheers!
Stacey