By Conor McDonough, Partner, Scribendi Digital Marketing
If you built your website in the last five years, chances are it was built on a WordPress platform. 35% of all existing websites use WordPress, from giants like The New York Times to your local bakery or wedding photographer. It is an adaptable, easy to manage platform that gives you everything you need to keep up with Google’s search parameters. But it requires maintenance and updates, especially of themes and plugins. And if that maintenance is not managed, your site could go down in an instant.
We recently took over management of a WordPress website that had experienced significant downtime (we’re talking more than a week) because the company was in between website developers and no one at the company was confident in updating WordPress. Upon inspection of the back end of the WordPress platform it was clear that the site was behind several generations of the WordPress software itself and that there were themes and plugins installed that had not been updated in years. In one case there was an installed, inactive theme that had not been updated since 2010!
Un-updated themes and plugins lead to security holes and openings for hackers and malware: the kind of malware that gets a website shut down by every hosting provider. While some updates can be set on auto-pilot, the overall WordPress software is updated and improved so often that it is easy for even an auto-updated plugin or theme to become incompatible with WordPress and open to hackers.
These are not problems you or anyone at your company should have to worry about. That is why we offer annual maintenance of WordPress websites. We keep track of all the latest updates to WordPress, installed themes, and plugins, and we make sure your site is always up and running.
To learn more about our WordPress maintenance program, email us at support@scribendi.net today!