Maintaining your WordPress website is surely not an easy task. A sophisticated website can increase your WordPress monthly maintenance fee if you’re outsourcing your maintenance or even if you have an in-house developer.
Also, WordPress maintenance can cost you a lot of your valuable time that you can utilize to focus on your business. On top of that, what if you get stuck somewhere while maintaining your website?
Numerous factors can affect the overall maintenance fee of your WordPress websites. So, today in this blog, we’re going to uncover some of the factors that affect your WordPress maintenance fee.
Moreover, I’m also going to tell you about some of the tools that you can use to maintain your website, so, without any further ado – let’s go!
Table of Contents
What Is WordPress Website Maintenance?
In the fewest possible words, WordPress website maintenance refers to the practice of maintaining your website to ensure that it is working perfectly.
Your website’s contentious maintenance results in optimum health and security of your WordPress website plus, it keeps your website running smoothly and fully functional.
Website maintenance includes the evaluation of the following points. It is the evaluation of the points mentioned below that guarantee the performance of your website:
- Update Installation.
- Uptime Monitoring.
- Content Optimization.
- Security Checking.
- Plugin Updates.
There are many other tasks involved in the maintenance of a WordPress website; however, I’ve decided to include the more specific ones that can affect the cost of maintaining your website.
Why Do You Need WordPress Maintenance?
Website maintenance is extremely important because you’ve already paid thousands of dollars in getting a website built for your business. Now, you have to make sure that it is flawless by all means, and for this, you need website maintenance.
Leaving a website unattended would cost you higher in the long term, whereas evaluating your website’s performance monthly or regularly would lead to not only an optimal WordPress website but also reduced long-term cost.
Think of your website as a car. When it is new, you don’t need much to make sure it is working fine at the start. However, as it gets old, it requires tuning to achieve optimal performance.
Moreover, here are a few reasons why you should consider maintaining your WordPress website:
- Constant monitoring of your website makes it prone to cyber-attacks.
- The cost of repairing a website can get unbearable because many factors can be compromised.
- If your website is not timely updated, it could lead to compatibility issues, and it can cause expensive redesigning or reconfigurations.
- According to research, a one-second delay in your website’s loading speed can cause a 7% decrease in your conversion ratio.
- You could lose all your data if your website is not backed up regularly.
The points mentioned above are just some of the most reasons why you need website maintenance. Moreover, a proactive website that is regularly maintained costs less as compared to a website that is fixed once a year.
So, with the what and why out of the way, let’s start discussing the factors that affect your WordPress monthly maintenance fee.
5 Factors That Affect Your WordPress Maintenance Fee
Maintenance Tools
There are several maintenance tools out there that you can leverage to maintain your WordPress website. These tools enable you to check your website’s performance, and if there are issues, you can identify and address them easily.
Several tools out there all serve a different purpose, and they are quite necessary because literally every bit of maintenance your WordPress website comes with a tool, and these tools come with a price tag.
So, depending on the type of maintenance and the issues your website is facing, you would need to buy tools, which would certainly affect your WordPress maintenance cost.
Backup
Backup is perhaps the most crucial aspect of your website. You need to have a backup because if your sites get down or deleted, you can be assured that your data was safely backed up.
The process of restoring a website from backup is much more convenient, efficient, and quick compared to trying to retrieve the data through other means.
So, now that you know the importance of having a backup of your site, you may need to buy some of the best plugins out there that let you easily backup your website’s data.
BackupBuddy is one example of some tools that can be used to safely back up your website’s data.
Comment Spam Deletion
Spam comments are, unfortunately, a reality. Every website that allows its audience to share their views on their website can get spam comments.
Having these kinds of slurs can have an impact on the overall reputation of your website. Seriously, your professionalism is at stake here, and you have to delete these comments to make sure your website is looking professional and credible.
Here, you can use some help from “Spam Filtering Plugins.” This plugin would help minimize the need to manually deleting comments.
There are several alike plugins out there capable of filtering out spam comments and reducing the time spent on deleting them.
Core & Plugin Updates
Another important aspect of your website that you need to check regularly to make your site compatible with the latest features and functionalities.
By updating your WordPress core and plugins, you can ensure a seamless and modernized experience for your customers. The core updates also help you stay secured from several types of cyber-attacks.
Also, keeping your plugins update would give your website new features. So, if you’re not updating your site, it may deliver a poor, lagging, and slow user experience full of errors. This could also make your website an easy target for hackers.
Additionally, in some cases, when the website was updated, it was missing some features. This is the risk involved in updating the core or plugin of your WordPress website. Also, this makes it important to check your website thoroughly after every update.
This is largely a manual and time-consuming job, and it may require a WordPress developer to update the core and plugins efficiently; hence, this may also affect your WordPress maintenance fee.
Pro-tip: Try updating your website’s plugins one at a time and check for changes on the website after the update. This would help you easily identify what caused the problem.
Quality Assurance
Quality assurance is perhaps the most viable and important aspect of maintaining a WordPress website.
If your website is missing quality in terms of features, experience, or functionality, it is missing a whole lot of potential customers, leads, conversions, and traffic.
My recommendation for you would be to opt for monthly quality assurance of your WordPress website to make sure that it is fulfilling its purpose perfectly.
Here are the following issues that are identified and fixed when you’re opting for quality assurance of your WordPress website:
- Speed of your website.
- Search functionality.
- CTAs, pages, and forms are working.
- Page browsing and design fixes.
- Secure payment gateway and checkout process. (for eCommerce stores)
The issues mentioned above are some of the most important things that need to be fixed if they’re not working properly. These aspects are an integral part of the experience that your website is delivering. Hence, you need to ensure that they are fully functional.
Furthermore, you can manually check your website for quality if you have time because it is a time-consuming task or buy a paid service like Pingdom.
Pingdom monitors your website’s performance and gives you a detailed report on your website’s functionality and health. However, you may have to pay for this, which would also increase your WordPress maintenance cost.
Conclusion
Here are some of the most important factors you need to consider when opting for your WordPress site’s monthly maintenance.
If you have the experience and expertise of handling WordPress maintenance on your own, my suggestion would be to go on and update your website so that you can play with the big sharks in the digital world.
However, if you don’t have any experience with WordPress, I would advise you to let the pros handle your WordPress maintenance because what we covered above is just the tip of the iceberg.
There are numerous other aspects that you need to check when you are maintaining your WordPress website. And not only are these factors time-consuming, but also it is risky to initiate maintenance without experience.
So, let the pros handle your WordPress site, and in the meantime, you can focus on other aspects of your business.
