1. Security
Security is arguably the most important reason why you should keep your WordPress website up to date. WordPress currently powers 23% of all websites in the world. Due to it’s immense popularity, WordPress is a popular target for hackers, malicious code distributors, data thieves, and wanna be hackers. Since WordPress is open source, anyone can study the source code to learn and improve it. However it also means that hackers can study it too and find ways to break into websites.
2. Speed
WordPress developers are always trying to make things faster. Each new release comes with several performance improvements that makes WordPress run faster and more efficient.
Since speed is a huge factor in SEO, you should definitely keep your WordPress updated to ensure maximum performance benefits. Even one theme core or plug-in that is not updated will often slow down your website or cause certain functions of your website to become unresponsive.
3. Treat Your Visitors Well
Whether your WordPress website generates income, promotes your brand or simply fuels readers’ appetite for content, you must treat your visitors well. But if you’re running an out-dated version of WordPress under your hood, your website could get “glitchy”.
Your visitors could encounter unexplained frustrations with your website. And you may never know about these problems until diminishing traffic sends up a red flag. WordPress updates are continually solving user issues. And by keeping current, you can preempt many technical issues before they rear their ugly heads to your visitors.
4. Updating Plugins and Themes
Updating core WordPress is important, but it is also important to update the themes and plugins you use, as a bug in one of these can affect your whole installation including speed, performance and security.
5. Complete Backup of Website Files and Database
The database, files and images (everything that comes together to create your website) are downloaded every month to a server and can be transferred to a secure Dropbox folder. If anything happens to your website host or to the website itself we’ve got a copy of your website safe, secure and ready to be reinstated.
6. Complete Reinstall If Needed
As you tentatively make changes to your website, do you ever worry you’ll break it? Plugin conflicts, wonky lines of code and hacking can all break your site. If the worst happens we’ll reinstall your site from the last saved backup.
7. Better Pricing
When you purchase a maintenance package for your website, you will qualify for a lower hourly rate. Similar to buying in bulk, when you subscribe for one of our maintenance packages you save money.
8. Search Engines
Website maintenance is critical to search-engine rankings. Websites with old content rank lower in search engine listings. Some search engines, including Google, check your page’s “if-modified-since” HTTP header to determine whether it is worth crawling. Failing to make frequent modifications could cause you to be pushed below active competitors in the listings and cost you business over time.
9. Brand Identity
Your website is a public reflection of your brand identity. A poorly maintained website with lots of errors, broken links, dead pages and outdated information projects a sloppy image and can put a bad taste in the mouth of your customers. We will routinely examine the look and feel of your website and update it to match your brand.
10. Long Term Cost Savings
If you keep your site maintained and updated regularly, there’s less chance of something major going wrong that will cost a lot of money to make right. You have to weigh the pros and cons. A monthly sum to make sure your site is secure and working properly, versus the possibility and cost of a complete site rebuild in a worst case scenario
