Do I Need Someone to Manage My Website for Me?
If you own a business, you know that using your website to get new leads and customers is a huge timesaver compared to old-school marketing techniques. Investing in a well-optimized website gives your business the best opportunities to be found by people searching for your services. When discussing new WordPress website projects and redesigns with business owners, we often hear, “Do I need someone to manage my website for me?“
It depends…
Website Management for Small Business
How do I manage my WordPress business website?
Two of the most beautiful powerful things about WordPress as a platform, are that:
- It provides a very solid SEO foundation right out of the box
- And it also gives the website owner the ability to make content updates without waiting around for a developer
However, with the power of the WordPress platform, comes the responsibility of maintaining it.
Every website, whether WordPress or not, has a lot of moving parts behind the scene. Unless you are using a website builder paid monthly service like Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, or even WordPress.com, the maintenance of your self-hosted WordPress website is your responsibility to arrange.
From the settings on the hosting account, to the server configuration, to WordPress and all of its plugins, they all need monitoring, adjustments, and updates.
While much of the maintenance is related to keeping everything purring at optimum levels, some maintenance is crucial to the security of your website. We’ve put together a checklist of daily, weekly, monthly and yearly WordPress website maintenance tasks.
WordPress Website Maintenance Checklist
Daily Website Maintenance Tasks
- Uptime Monitoring
- Security Monitoring
- Website & Database Backups
Weekly Website Maintenance Tasks
- Plugin / Theme Updates
- Malware Scans
- Visual Inspection
- Moderate Spam Comments
Monthly Website Maintenance Tasks
- Monitor Traffic & Search Engine Rankings
- Clean Junk/Old data from Database
- Remove Unnecessary Users (WordPress Site Health will remind you of this)
- Delete Unused Themes and Plugins (WordPress Site Health will remind you of this)
- Test Loading Time
- Search for Broken Links
- Check for Search Console Errors/Issues
Annual Website Maintenance Tasks
- Review WordPress Setup
- Review Your SEO Content Strategy
- Renew Hosting, Website Domain Name, Domain Name Servers (DNS) & Licenses
How much does it cost to maintain a WordPress website?
WordPress website maintenance plans can vary in price a great deal depending on what services you are getting.
Backups, updates and security scans should make up the basics of a website maintenance plan, which could range from $39 – $199/month. Be sure to evaluate providers based on their expertise, experience, and trustworthiness and not just the price.
A website management plan could also include unlimited small (or large) content updates, monthly SEO tasks and monitoring, priority white-glove service, or even ongoing content strategy consulting resulting in monthly pricing anywhere from $99/month to $5000/month or more.
Are WordPress monthly maintenance packages worth it?
That fact is, technically speaking, all of these specialties are accessible through reading documentation and acquiring practical experience, allowing anyone to become proficient at all of these these more technical tasks.
But ask yourself…Do I have time to do this?
Most professionals don’t. Your business relies on you to do lots of things… but learning all aspects of website management is likely not one of them.
Engaging a professional to manage your website is probably a better option than doing it yourself for many reasons. It’s their full time job to know all of the required skills and to keep up to date on changes and advancements in all the necessary areas.
Also consider those times when a situation with a website is an emergency:
- Your website just isn’t working. When users visit it they just get a blank screen or an error message.
- Your website is hacked and is redirecting users to to a malicious website, or is showing some unwanted messages.
- You have important information that needs to be added to your website very quickly
- You have inaccurate or out-of-date information that needs to be removed from your website very quickly
Usually the most critical website issues require extreme urgency. Ask yourself if that’s the time you want to be trying to figure out where to go to address the problem, how to gain access when you get there, and how to do what you need to to when you finally get access to the correct system.
In that time of need you want to know that there is one call or email you can make to have the issue resolved.
So…Do you need someone to manage your website for you?
When you consider what a website issue can mean, from loss of business to damage to your reputation, your answer to the question “Do I Need Someone to Manage My Website for Me?”, should probably almost always be YES.
