Maintenance Matters: How Much Does WordPress Maintenance Cost?

Would you purchase a car or a house and never spend any money on maintenance thinking that it would be fine without it? You wouldn’t!

The same thing applies to your WordPress website. Websites are like little children – they need constant maintenance, attendance, care, and updates.

More on point, ransomware attacks hit a record high of 300 million in the first half of 2021!

If you aren’t sure what that is, you need to hire a WordPress maintenance service asap. Read on to find out more about the costs and advantages of WordPress maintenance and support plans.

What Would a WordPress Maintenance Service Do?

Your website is like your online business card – it’s the face of your company and your brand reputation online.

What would happen to your business if your WordPress website maintenance was lacking and your website went down for a few hours or even a few days at a time? How much money would your business lose? How many potential leads, clients, and customers would you end up missing out on?

A WordPress maintenance service can take care of all those peripherals for you, so you don’t have to stay up at night worrying about them. Some of these services would entail:

Perform Backups of Your Website

Do you have a backup of your website right now? What would happen if the server in which your website is hosted was damaged in a fire or some other natural disaster? How would you recover your website and all your customer data?

This is something you don’t want to worry about. That’s why a maintenance service is so necessary to your business. It can ensure that everything on your WordPress website is backed up regularly, so you never need to worry about losing your precious data due to uncontrollable circumstances.

Keeping the WordPress Platform Up-to-Date

As with other software systems, WordPress is also constantly updating its platform to remove bugs and add new features. That’s good news for you. BUT, every time WordPress does an update, you have to upgrade your WordPress website as well, which isn’t necessarily as easy as clicking the ‘Update’ key.  Depending on the complexity of your website, a WordPress update can potentially break your website resulting in unplanned downtime, and loss of revenue.

You will have to ensure you backup your entire site, before hitting that update button. In addition, themes and plugins are constantly being updated as well and you probably have at least a dozen or more plugins on your website.

If you don’t think you can keep on top of these updates, then a WordPress maintenance service is exactly what your website needs.

Finding and Fixing Bugs and Other Issues

A WordPress website is an enormous project, especially if it includes eCommerce and other complex features. The bigger the project, the more likely it is that there will be errors in it, especially if it was rushed through. There are many bugs that you need to watch out for when it comes to WordPress websites, like duplicate meta tags, broken links, missing images, and more.

Also, each time you do an update for a theme or plugin, it could introduce new problems into your website that need to be fixed asap.

If you don’t have the bandwidth to go in and take care of these bugs, then hire an expert WordPress maintenance team to do that for you.

Protect Your Website From Hackers, and All Malefic Entities

There are many anonymous entities out there interested in hacking your website and infiltrating your confidential and precious customer data. Do you know if your website is protected from all viruses, malware, and spam?

If you aren’t interested in becoming a cybersecurity expert, then it’s time for you to engage the services of a WordPress team to take care of your website security.

Ensure Your Website Runs Smoothly 24/7

Have you ever received a phone call in the middle of the night from a harried salesperson from across the globe who informs you that your business website is down? Did you scramble to find someone to get your website online again?

That’s why it’s important to have a service in place that ensures WordPress experts are monitoring your website 24/7 in order keep your website running smoothly, so it doesn’t fall on your shoulders in emergencies.

Publishing Content

You might have an in-house marketing team that creates content or social media posts, but what about placing these all on your website? Can you trust your marketing team to fiddle with your website, a life source for your business?

With a WordPress maintenance service, you can delegate all content updates and website edits to them. It will ensure that your team doesn’t make some random mistake when updating a webpage, resulting in massive design issues across your website. You know how annoying it is to go on a webpage and find that it’s completely nonfunctional, with faulty formatting, and all images missing. You don’t want your customers to feel this same irritation and lower your reputation in their minds.

Traffic & Analytics

Do you wish you could find out how many people are visiting your website every month or even every day, from which country your visitors are, and what pages on your website they are interacting with? Do you wish to know where interest in your website drops off and causes people to leave increasing your bounce rate?

These are all high-level traffic analytics that a WordPress maintenance team can gather, and report to you, in a simple and easy-to-understand format.

How Much Would Typical WordPress Maintenance Plans Cost?

Considering how many responsibilities a WordPress maintenance service takes off your plate, you would imagine it would be a priceless service. Thankfully, it’s far more reasonably priced.

The cost for a WordPress maintenance plan can cover a wide range depending on the complexity of the website.

For example, if you have a small business website, it could be $50 a month to maintain it. But a custom-built eCommerce website or enterprise website could be as high as $500 or more a month.

These are all average figures, and your website could be cheaper or more expensive than this to maintain. If you have a website that includes Salesforce integration or some other intricately built CRM, maintaining all that would require even more time and money.

DIY or In-house Team Can Be More Expensive in the Long Run

Being on a WordPress maintenance plan can be much cheaper than hiring an in-house team to take care of things. This is because you get the services of an entire team of experts with a WordPress maintenance service for a small monthly fee.

You don’t have to worry about benefits, salaries, and other details like that. And you also don’t have to worry about paying your staff extra or overtime pay on those days that they need to work through the night to maintain or update your website.

All this saves you time, money, and effort.

If you have a website that’s quite complicated with a lot of bells and whistles, avoid DIY website maintenance at all costs. It will only result in a huge disaster down the road, that will end up costing you a lot more money to fix. It will also result in a lot of wasted time, and lost potential revenue, with your website being down for hours or days on end.

Web Development, Domain, and Platforms Could Cost More

Remember that WordPress maintenance service assumes that you already have a WordPress website that’s functional and ready to go. That’s why web development from scratch will not be included in the monthly plan but would be an add-on.

In addition, hosting costs, platform costs, and domain costs could be extra as well (depending on the plan and company). Finally, if you have subscriptions to other platforms integrated into WordPress like Salesforce, or others, that would be at your expense entirely.

Of course, you would need to have a detailed conversation with your WordPress maintenance team to figure out what their services include and what is out of scope for them.

Stop Worrying About Your Website – Outsource It

There are many reasons to outsource WordPress maintenance to an outside team or company. Are you convinced yet that WordPress maintenance plans are the way to go?

If so, book a 30-minute call with WPAssist to figure if they are a good fit for you or not. It’s a free, no-pressure consultation call, so there’s nothing to lose here.