Website Maintenance

First, why are there even updates?

A website has many moving parts – think of it like your iPhone / Android phone. There are three components:

• PHP is like Swift (Apple’s programming language)
• WordPress core is like iOS
• Plugins are like the apps you download.

Just as Apple regularly updates Swift and iOS for better security and performance, PHP and WordPress core receive the same treatment. This makes sense when you consider that WordPress powers over 40% of all websites on the internet.

Then app developers follow suit: When these foundational updates roll out, plugin developers follow suit. They update their plugins to leverage new features and capabilities, staying competitive and ensuring their products remain viable in the marketplace.

But here’s the catch: Here’s where it gets tricky: as more developers adopt newer standards, they gradually abandon support for older versions. Why? The market for outdated systems shrinks, making it financially impractical to maintain compatibility with versions that few people use.

The dependency chain: Eventually, this will break your website because your site relies on many different components to function properly: contact forms, mobile responsiveness, image loading, security features, and more. When the underlying technology gets too far behind, these essential functions start failing.

It’s not as scary as it sounds: Even though all three components of a website get updated frequently, not every update is critical. We only need to update these things once a year to keep everything running smoothly. Website maintenance is actually quite simple – just a few hours annually extends your website’s life and performance for another full year. Best of all, this annual maintenance costs only a fraction of what you’d pay for a completely new website.

Why Did Your Last WordPress Did Not Need Any Maintenance?

“That’s why you had to get a new website” is the obvious answer. A supplementary answer is that your old website was not important in your lead generation efforts, so it has little impact even it fails.

Your current website is bringing in a lot more leads and have a lot of visitors on it, it can’t fail. To ensure it doesn’t fail, we just need to keep it up to date, just like you change your car’s tires, brake pads, etc.