The Importance and Benefits of Maintaining a WordPress Website After Launch 

Imagine you just bought your dream car. It is brand new, shiny, and in perfect condition. But instead of taking it home and parking it in your garage, you park it on a busy public street and then forget about it for a couple of years. When you come back to your car, you see that it has some big scratches across the body, dings from storm damage, a large dent on the fender, windows broken in from thieves, a parking boot on the wheel, rust on all the mechanical parts, and even though it technically turns on, it is practically useless, leaving you wondering why you even bought the car in the first place. 

This is how some people treat their new websites. They think that getting a website is the end goal, but then neglect the necessary maintenance needed to make that investment worthwhile.

This is why at Sanctuary we value not only producing visually stunning websites that run well and that are optimized for our clients’ needs, but also maintaining those websites, ensuring they are kept secure, performant, and effective for years to come.

Keep Your Website Secure and Up to Date 

This is the foundational step. If you do nothing else, you should ensure that your website is set up with proper security measures that fit your business and is kept up to date. If either of these are neglected, then any other maintenance efforts you employ could be irrelevant.

First and foremost, keeping your site up to date should be on the top of your list of ongoing maintenance. Even if you have a simple WordPress site, odds are you will have at least a couple of plugins installed. Even if you don’t, WordPress itself receives updates. 

These updates are vital both for keeping your website as optimized and secure. If you neglect these updates over time, security vulnerabilities that have been discovered by either the developer, or worse, hackers will go unpatched. This is a major security risk as even one moderately outdated plugin could be a wide-open door for anyone who might have nefarious intentions. Additionally, updates to plugins can also fix known issues, bugs as well as add performance fixes that could improve your site’s end-user experience.

Secondly, adding security measures on your site is vital. Even implementing a simple security plugin can go a long way to protecting your website investment. Some security features to think about including should be 2FA (two-factor authentication) for login, malware scanners or monitors, brute force attack defense, site lockout functionality, and obscuring backend login pages or portals. 

Beyond these security features and improvements, you should also consider keeping backups of your site, just in case you may need to roll back the site for any reason. We recommend having a daily backup of your site if possible. Some hosting platforms offer this as part of their hosting package. 

A daily backup provides peace of mind, knowing that even if something drastic happens, you have the backup to rely on, potentially saving massive amounts of time, money, and headaches.

Monitor and Optimize Performance 

Maintenance doesn’t just mean securing your site once and periodically updating plugins. It also means continued monitoring of functionality and user experience, then making adjustments based on those observations to further optimize site performance and usability.

Some important strategies to include for your site are:

• Uptime Monitoring: At the most basic level, setting up some kind of uptime monitoring is a good first step. Being able to get notifications about if your site is up and running can help fix any potential issues quickly.
• Site Speed Optimization: A slow site can turn away users, and a site that is not being maintained will degenerate over time. Continued optimization of images, site files, and caching systems will help keep your site running efficiently, retaining users and potential projects or engagement.
• Fix Broken Elements: Even if you think your site is small and won’t change, the reality is that the rest of the internet is constantly evolving. Links to external sources, pages, or tools, can change. Forms can break and stop sending notifications. The emails those notifications route to could change. These are just a few examples, but all it takes in one break in a process to lose a lead.

Keep Content and SEO Moving Forward 

The key thing to remember here is that a website that does not continue to add new content or adapt to the needs of its users will slowly become invisible. Not only because the content will become stale and outdated, but because a site that never changes can effectively disappear in SEO (Search Engine Optimization). 

To avoid this, there are a few relatively simple steps you can take to help keep your website fresh, relevant, and visible:

1. Content Updates: At the very least, ensure that you keep your contact information, team details, locations, and current messaging current. A user seeing your Christmas sale advertised on the home page in June can be a red flag and push them away as a potential customer. Additionally, If you are able, create a blog or section on your website that you can post information about your speciality or industry, it does not have to be ground breaking information, just something that tells users (and google) that you are still an active organization.
2. SEO Monitoring: There are many benefits to incorporating SEO monitoring into your website maintenance. It can be difficult to gauge how your website is performing , but SEO monitoring is like turning on a light in a dark room. It helps you track what you are doing well and what are potential opportunities for improvement.
3. Conversion Optimization: In many cases, your site is built to funnel users into a few predefined call to actions. The trick is keeping users interested and interacting with your site for long enough for them to finish that conversion. This is where conversion optimization comes in, from forms, landing pages, to the actual CTA’s they can all be tested and optimized to draw more attention and thus more interaction with your organization. 

Following Through

In the end, a website is not a one-time project. It is an ongoing investment. Without consistent attention to security, performance, and content, even the best-built site can quickly lose its value. 

By staying proactive and treating maintenance as part of your overall strategy, you ensure that your website continues to support your business, generate leads, and deliver a strong experience for your users long after launch.