WordPress has become a staple in the business world. As the online market has developed and taken its fair share of commerce and then some, the need to make sites that stand out has become apparent for almost every business. WordPress makes that process relatively simple and accessible to most. 

However, it’s also not something that you throw together and forget about. You’ll need to regularly maintain your WordPress site to keep it operating optimally. Unfortunately, we often see clients who don’t have a plan in place to guide those maintenance efforts or automate updates properly.

Here are the top 8 reasons why you need a WordPress maintenance plan to make that happen.

1: An Experienced Partner

First and foremost, you can never underestimate the value of having a pre-established relationship with a specialist. Even if you’re knowledgeable about WordPress and managing a website in general, having that dedicated specialist as part of your network is a boon. 

A maintenance plan not only helps take all the other things we’re going to talk to you about off your shoulders, but it also gives you an established relationship if you end up needing similar services, guidance, or a heads up that your site might be going in the wrong direction. 

2: Security

Outdated security protocols can damage your site, your customers’ lives, and your business’s future.

Now, you will get notifications when new security updates come out, and you can simply approve their implementation manually. However, you’re probably not on your website every moment of the day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. There’s a high likelihood that each time a security update is released, you won’t get around to updating it for at least a few hours. It might even take days or weeks for you to see it.

Every moment your security system is out of date, everything on your site is vulnerable to cyber threats. A serious breach can put your customer’s data, your company’s data, and your reputation at risk.

A WordPress maintenance plan automates these updates and ensures you’re always secure.

3: Implement New Features

New features are constantly coming out for WordPress, but if you’re not seeking them out or automating their implementation, you’ll likely go without them for far longer than you should. This puts you behind the curve technologically and denies your target audience the features they’re starting to get used to on other sites; leaving them with a declined quality of experience.

This doesn’t just impact you by making your target audience less likely to engage, but you miss out on site operation features that can be useful, too.

4: SEO Efforts are More Effective

Whether you’re a blogger trying the affiliate marketing route, a major retailer, or an educational personality just trying to inform the public, SEO is crucial. It’s how your content, product, or service gets in front of an audience likely to engage with it.

SEO effectiveness is also determined by search engines (namely Google), and if you don’t keep your site up to date, it will rank lower in the search results. This directly impacts your site and slows your traffic to a crawl.

A maintenance plan keeps your site caught up with the search engine’s standards and helps it rank higher.

5: Adopt the Latest Tech

As new tech advancements are made, your site has to keep up, or it won’t be compatible. Look at how drastically the internet changed when smartphones became commonplace. Sites that didn’t update and catch up with the tech curve fell into obscurity. Now, your site is either mobile-friendly, or you won’t see a lot of traffic.

Now, this isn’t part of a normal maintenance package. With WP Support, we can handle all of this for you if you opt for our extensive redesign or custom development package. However, having a maintenance plan that helps you notice the small details as performance drops due to those issues can help you know when it’s time to get that extra help. 

These types of tech advancements are made all the time, and it’s important to make sure your site is continuously kept up with the tech curve.

6: Maintain Your Site’s Public Perception

Your site’s quality is a reflection of you and your business. When consumers go to a site, and it’s not up to par with the standards set by the internet at large, you look less authoritative and professional.

Again, you can look at old websites from the early 00s that were never updated. They look wildly unprofessional, tossed together, and unsafe to make transactions with sometimes.

A maintenance plan doesn’t directly fix this issue. What you really need in this case is a redesign or custom development package that offers extensive support in revamping the whole site or page.

However, a maintenance plan can be imperative to both pinpointing when this is an issue and help you keep your site on the right track after those big changes are made. 

7: Improved Site Performance

This is crucial. In the modern era, taking a couple of seconds to load can be a death sentence for your site. Internet users have grown used to near-instant loading times, and if a site makes them wait, they “site hop” to something else.

The automated updating process of a maintenance plan ensures that your site has the best chance of meeting performance standards and serving your audience properly. This directly leads to more conversions, site traffic, and accomplished company goals.

8: It’s Financially Accessible

Finally, there’s simply no reason not to have one. All the benefits we’ve talked about thus far can be had at an extremely accessible price point. Most basic packages cost less than a couple of streaming subscriptions, and even higher-tier options are affordable for businesses.

It’s difficult to say that there’s any situation where it wouldn’t be optimal to pay the small fee because of how many benefits there are for it. There are few instances where such an extremely beneficial tool is financially accessible for businesses of all sizes and types.

Get Help with Your WordPress Site from WP Support

Understanding the reasons why you need a WordPress maintenance plan is crucial, as it can automate most of your site’s maintenance needs. However, to truly benefit from these reasons, you need a good maintenance plan provider to ensure you receive the best service possible.

WP Support offers a variety of packages to meet any site’s needs at competitive prices. Contact WP Support today.