What is a WordPress Website Maintenance Plan

Building a website is just the first step to cultivating your digital presence and offering a virtual method for connecting with customers. You must continually maintain and update your website to protect and optimize your investment and keep the online aspect of your business running properly. 

To help you effectively manage your company’s professional website after launch and keep it functioning smoothly, you should consider acquiring a website maintenance plan from professionals well-versed in the WordPress system.

Why Do WordPress Websites Need Maintenance?

WordPress website maintenance is important for a variety of reasons. The digital world is evolving constantly, presenting new challenges and opportunities to businesses across industries.

Software, themes, and plugins enhance the user experience, but reputable plugins and themes operate optimally only for a time before they need to be updated or replaced due to security changes and wider-scale system updates on WordPress. Your website’s performance quality can start to falter if the plugins isn’t updated as needed.

New cyber threats or types of malware are frequently emerging, which threaten the safety of your website. Because WordPress has approximately 56,000 plugins available and is the most widely used platform for websites, hackers look for backdoors and holes in plugins regularly.

Without proper website maintenance, your web presence is vulnerable.

Search engines also make changes to how their algorithms rank content. Without proper website maintenance to ensure quick loading speeds and security, you could be decreasing your ability to connect with prospective and existing clients and hurting your bottom line.  

What Does Website Maintenance Include?

Website maintenance and support services can run the gambit, depending on your particular plan, but they tend to focus on monitoring, security, performance, and backups. Your plan could also cover services like updating plugins, fixing broken links, and even refreshing outdated content.  

Typically, you’ll get free hosting (which is separate from maintenance) and your website will be monitored 24/7. If a vulnerability arises, your maintenance team should address it immediately. The goal is to keep the site running with minimal disruptions and to handle any cyber threats that arise. This is referred to as ‘website uptime’. The team also backs up your content regularly in multiple sources so you won’t lose anything important if there is a system failure or cyber-attack. Backups are handy in cases of user error during website changes as well.

Monthly Website Maintenance Plan Example

You will receive a monthly website care report that is easy to read and understand and that outlines what maintenance activity took place in the most recent time period.

For example, your monthly report might include:

• The number of updates and backups performed and when
• The security level of your site or any threats encountered in the past month
• Site analytics, such as page views and the number and duration of user site sessions
• Site performance, such as page loading speed
• Your website’s overall uptime, or the amount of time that it was available to users—often presented as a percentage of the time it could have been.

Here is an example of what Third Angle’s Monthly Start Website Care Plan Report’s look like.

Purchasing a WordPress Website Care Plan

While you can do some website maintenance in-house, there are benefits to hiring a company that is deeply familiar with the WordPress system and the issues that plague websites. If the company developed your business website, they’ll be even more acquainted with your specific needs.

The cost of a WordPress website maintenance plan depends on what services you want bundled in. Generally, a web design and maintenance company, such as Third Angle, offers different tiers, starting from bare necessity services to more robust services that include revision requests and ongoing development services.

Third Angle’s website maintenance plans start at $49 per month and help you focus on what you actually started your business to do by taking over necessary but time-consuming tasks that keep your website running smoothly.

If you prefer to DIY, here’s a handy website maintenance checklist you can use to keep your website working hard for your business.