Do I need my website maintained?

We think you do. In fact, we strongly recommend it.

Maintaining your website is the same as Maintaining your business.

Your website serves as a constant online presence for your customers and prospects. Your “virtual shop window” is always open and is frequently the first place prospective clients look to learn more about you and what you have to offer. It’s vitally important that things are always as they should be, so that your website visitors stay and look around. Brighton WEBtech is known for creating great websites, but we often maintain them as well.

If you know what you’re doing, possibly. However…

If you think that maintaining a WordPress website is just updating the plugins now and then, we respectfully suggest that you get someone else to do it. Someone who’s used to doing it. Someone who knows what to do when things go wrong.

WordPress maintenance is quite a bit more than just updating plugins and themes. You’ll need to make sure it’s backed up. Depending on how active your website is, will determine how often you make changes to it. Your website is safe with us.

Can I do my own WordPress maintenance?

Is it really that important?

We love WordPress websites and think that they’re the best. But we would do. That’s what we specialise in. They’re robust and customisable with the addition of plugins. Therein lies its Achilles heel. Let me explain:

A fresh installation of WordPress, straight out-of-the-box, as it were, is a mature and stable platform and incredibly difficult to break. So, why do you hear about WordPress websites being easily hackable? More often than not, it’s because of a poorly maintained website. Or using dodgy plugins. Most plugins are well written, some are not. All of them need to be kept up-to-date.

We take care of that.

I’ve been around long enough to see and hear too many horror stories regarding backups. It’s not funny.

Here’s a story that’s true. In a server room, far, far away, I was checking an unnamed company’s backup routines. This was in the day when tape backup was still a good idea. The person in charge was very proud that the backup tape was put in the machine every single night at going home time. What I had to point out to them, was the tape was broken! They were going through the motions, but no backup was being taken!

Here’s the moral to that story. If you’re going to take a backup, you need to be sure that it’s a backup you can recover from. Otherwise, you’re wasting your time.

What we do at Brighton WEBtech, is when we take a backup, we test it. We have to know it works. Otherwise, it’s very, very scary, if you need that backup, you want it to work. Crossing your fingers, isn’t a policy we recommend.

While we’re on the subject, it’s good practice (which really means vital) to store said backup away from the same server the website is on.

The Website is backed up – now what?

OH NO – IT’S TOO LATE! WHAT CAN I DO?

If it’s already too late and the worst has happened, all might not be lost. Here’s what you should do:

Don’t panic!

If you’ve experience an attack on your website, or it’s gone down for no apparent reason, we know how distressing this can be. You’re losing sales and your business reputation is being affected. Understandably, you want this fixing as soon as possible. This is where our disaster recovery service comes in. Head over there and we should be able to help.