Neglecting Website maintenance is dangerous frugality!
Many small business owners need to be frugal with their marketing budget since it is usually very tight. Two areas that ARE a must are the investments in a website AND website maintenance. I try to explain that an online presence is mandatory in todays age and website maintenance is part of the package.
Not buying a maintenance package is probably one the of biggest mistakes an owner can make. Why? Because maintenance keeps you, your website AND your customers safe.
An article from one of the most popular and well known hosting companies GoDaddy called “Here’s why WordPress maintenance isn’t a monthly task” by Chad Warner outlines several important issues most business owners don’t think about:
- Just like your house can be broken into any time of any day, your website faces threats around the clock. Botnets and hackers prowl constantly. In early 2017, 1.5 million WordPress sites were hacked within a few days of disclosure of a vulnerability.
- Backup, Backup, Backup…this one can’t be stressed enough. Regular daily backups are crucial to the health of a website AND to the marketing budget. It is soooo much cheaper to maintain a site that it is to rebuild because there were no backups or no regular backups. I personally pray to the backup gods that I have daily backups on ALL client sites because inevitably I have been working on a site, it breaks and I restore to the day before…the only work lost is what I did at the time of failure. This not only saves my clients money, but it saves my sanity.
- Business owners typically have zero extra time to think about their websites let alone update them…leave it to a professional and invest in website maintenance…it is so worth it in the end AND it will save you money guaranteed!
I try to explain to clients that updating a website is very comparable to your smart phones, tablets and desktop computers. I am sure most of you are sometimes overwhelmed by how often these devices have updates. I own Apples products and have updates to apps and iOS weekly if not daily. Well, these updates are for security reasons as much as they are for updating the compatibility with operating systems. Updates keep your devices safe and secure and running as glitch free as possible. The same goes for websites. There is NO way around it and as soon as you accept this as part of owning a website, the easier it is to add it into the marketing budget.
Don’t cut corners to save a few dollars…include website maintenance in your budget today to save money for tomorrow!