A car needs servicing, a house needs repairs, and a website needs maintenance. The difference is that you hear the car rattle and see the crack in the wall. With a website you usually notice nothing until it’s too late: the site is slow, Google shows a warning, or someone else’s ad is suddenly on your homepage.
You’re not being targeted, you’re being scanned
In films, a hacker sits in a dark room choosing a target. In reality, automated bots crawl millions of websites around the clock looking for one thing: a known security hole that hasn’t been patched. When they find one, the site gets used. It spreads spam or malware, redirects visitors to scam pages, or mines cryptocurrency on your server’s budget.
A bot doesn’t care whether you’re a corporation or a three-person company. It just needs an open door. There are hundreds of sites that haven’t been touched in years, with someone else’s content on the homepage and an owner who has no idea.
Why “the site is done” doesn’t work
Most websites and online stores run on a content management system (WordPress is the most common) with a dozen plugins adding forms, a shop, SEO and more. Each plugin is separate software from a separate developer, with its own updates and its own vulnerabilities.
It’s a house of cards: every card holds up the others. When one plugin falls behind or an update clashes with another, the whole site can come down. A well-built site doesn’t stay good forever if nobody looks after it.
What a good web manager does every month
Think of a property manager. Residents could handle rubbish collection, cleaning, plumbing and electrics themselves, but most don’t have the time or the skills. A web manager is the same thing for your website.
- Updates, tested. Core, plugins and theme are updated regularly. Major updates are tried first so they don’t break forms, the shop or the design.
- Off-server backups. If something goes wrong, the site is restored in minutes, not days. A backup on the same server as the site isn’t a backup.
- Security monitoring. A firewall, login protection and file-change tracking, so an attack is caught before a visitor sees it.
- Speed monitoring. Oversized images, unnecessary plugins and a bloated database slow a site down. A slow site loses visitors and Google rankings.
- Broken links. External pages disappear and move. A web manager finds broken links and fixes them before they hurt the user experience and SEO.
- Browser compatibility. Browsers update too. The site has to work in the latest Chrome and on a three-year-old phone.
- Content. A good web manager doesn’t stop at the tech. A new service, a price change or a blog post reaches the site without you wrestling with the admin panel.
Who actually needs it?
Maintenance pays off most when:
- enquiries, bookings or orders come through the website;
- the site has a shop, customer accounts or any form that collects personal data;
- nobody in-house knows what a PHP version is or why it matters;
- the last update was “sometime last year”.
If your site is a pure business card that nobody visits, you can manage on your own. For everyone else, maintenance costs less than restoring one hacked site.
Want to know what state your site is in? See the website maintenance plans or write to me. I’ll do a first review for free and tell you honestly whether you need maintenance at all.
