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?“
The answer is that it really depends...Read on to learn what is involved and things that may affect your decision about whether or not you need someone to manage your website for you.
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:
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. To give you an idea of what's involved, 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)
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 SEO 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 have time to DIY website management. 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?
Avoid going it alone. The stakes are too high. While it's tempting to try and save money through DIYing your maintenance, a single misstep could result in substantial financial losses and lots of wasted hours of effort.
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.
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As partner & lead developer, I specialize in WordPress backend PHP programming. I have years of experience with ASP, PHP, Flash, Javascript and just about any language used to create on the web. I love working with StudioPress themes and the Genesis Framework on WordPress. Learn more about Eddy »
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