Maybe one of the worst things that can happen to a business owner is a hacked website. You spend a lot of time and money branding, copywriting, designing, and building your website. Your hard work transforms it into a highly valuable employee for your business. You’re starting to get some engagement online.
One morning you wake up and get that horrible call that nobody wants from a potential client or an existing client. “Hey there, did you know that your website is down”? Even worse, what if someone has hacked your site and redirected it to a competitor’s website? Maybe they’ve put something profane on your homepage? What do you do?
What most people do? They reach out to their website hosting company and pray that a backup exists. Then they start reaching out to the people who originally built the website in the first place. Sometimes, those people are long gone (ok let’s be honest…oftentimes they’re a faded memory). Sometimes they can’t even remember building the site and all they have is a backup that’s a year old.
Even if your website hosting company does have a backup – was it from yesterday – a week ago – 30 days ago – 6 months ago? Most hosting companies do not keep complete daily backups of every website they have. So you’re sitting there on the phone, talking to someone who is telling you all the technical problems on your website (btw…they won’t help you fix them) and now you’re just stuck.
This is where a Website Maintenance Plan can save the day! It provides peace of mind, security, maintenance, reliability, and can even help prevent the tragic but all to familiar story from above from ever happening!
So what are the 5 big reasons you need a Website Maintenance Plan?
Website Backups = Sleep at Night
There is literally nothing more difficult than losing a website. When I was younger and working as a hosting customer support representative, I’d have to have the gut-wrenching calls with clients who lost their sites due to programming errors, or hacking. We’d have to tell them it was their responsibility to keep backups. This still holds true in 2020.
The more redundant backups you have (multiple copies in different locations), the easier it is to sleep at night. We can typically restore a client to their website less than 24 hours previous. If you’ve ever worked all day (or paid someone else to) to do some SEO work, or build out new pages, you know the value an excellent backup plan will be in your business!
Website Security Benefits Everyone
You might have already read our article “Why Website Security Matters” (if you haven’t you should), but website security is important not just for your online users, but also for your Google ranking when people search for topics your business covers.
You want to make sure that your website hosting is SSL-friendly, and that your website is also SSL enabled. When you see the big red Chrome X in the upper left hand corner saying a site isn’t secure, most users immediately bail. Make sure you help keep them there by being secured!
Your Time is Precious, Spend it Wisely
While it’s really easy to hop into your Wordpress Dashboard and click until you clear out all of the red update notifications, this can suffer from the law of unintended consequences. Some plugins require different versions of PHP (nerd alert), or require pairing with another plugin to work. Sometimes a plugin doesn’t support the newest version of Wordpress and that can create big problems for your website. Figuring out and remembering all of this isn’t really that valuable to a business owner.
You Need Your Website Online
A friend of mine named Troy Dean recently told me that he spoke a convention of business owners. He asked them if their website was important to their business. They all said it was crucial. He then asked them if they were cool paying $50/mo for website hosting, and everyone said, whoa that’s expensive. $50/mo? Most people spend more on coffee than they do on their website hosting. Don’t be one of those people!
From a consumer’s point of view, there is NOTHING worse than arriving on a website that’s super slow, or not working at all. Most visitors don’t arrive on a website ready to buy, so if your website is slow or down, you’ve likely lost a potential customer. It’s worth being on an awesome WordPress hosting service – it could literally make you money!
Stay Ahead of the Curve with a Website Maintenance Plan
If there is one thing our team at Muletown Digital has learned in the last 2 years, it’s that technology moves quickly. Are you able to keep up with it? Does your business have someone on staff that knows when plugins are needing updates? Is it worth losing a big customer to a down website?
We believe that by staying up on what’s happening in the world of technology each day, you can AND SHOULD, stay ahead. That’s what our team is here to do for your business. Keep you safe, and secure. Keep you up and running so you can be banging on the doors of your ideal customers. A broken or down website not only impedes you from reaching your goals, but it also cripples your business and wastes countless hours of your time, that you need-not-waste.
Muletown Digital Wordpress Website Maintenance
Do you have a Wordpress website for your business? (If you don’t, you really should). Are you able to maintain your website properly? Do you feel safe? Are you getting the most out of your website? If someone hacked you, could you recover quickly…if at all?
If you’re not sure about this crazy technology business, let our team help. Even if you’re a tech wizard, your time is likely better spent growing your business than maintaining your website. Let our team help – let us make this painless for you and your company!
PS. If you don’t have a Wordpress website, we believe that you should. We’ve build some amazing and powerful applications on Wordpress (see our portfolio). Contact us today to see if we can port your website over so you can start taking advantage of the Wordpress platform in your business – RIGHT NOW.
PPS. If you’re not on WP – you’re likely being outranked by businesses that are – we can help you with that 100%!!!!’
Take a solid step for your business today with Muletown Digital – your friendly neighborhood digital presence guide.
Adam Silverman
Owner & CEO of Muletown Digital.
