Hello, this is Mikel with Tiny Frog Technologies and as you probably noticed, I’m not in the office today. I’m standing outside in our parking lot in front of my car and the reason is because I want to talk a little bit about website maintenance and correlate it to maintaining a car.
How to Maintain a WordPress Website
I have no idea how to maintain cars, but our company does a lot of WordPress maintenance. And, maintaining a website is a lot like maintaining a car. It’s very important – as you probably know if you do have a car – that you get somewhat regular maintenance done in terms of oil changes and tune-ups. If you skip enough oil changes, it may not have an impact in the short term, but over time you could have some very serious issues with your car. Your engine could cease, or you could have other problems occur if you’re not doing somewhat regular maintenance, and a WordPress site has very similar issues.
If you skip all the maintenance or the plug-in updates on your website, if you skip them once or twice, it may not have an issue, but over a period of time if you skip those website updates and plug-in updates, they could actually cause some very significant issues on the website because most of the plug-in updates are related to security and you’re downloading or uploading security patches to your website.
Every time you do a website update or plug-in update to WordPress, you’re essentially making your website more secure and reducing the chances of the website getting hacked. So we definitely recommend doing plug-in updates on a monthly basis. In fact, when we are maintaining currently about 600 WordPress sites and we update all the plug-ins every single month. By following that protocol of monthly updates, we are literally having zero security problems whereas WordPress is known to have a lot of security issues when it’s not being updated properly.
And secondly, if you skip enough WordPress updates, it makes it very difficult to update your website because if you skip a number of plug-in updates and you go several versions behind with those, you might take a while for you to catch up and it might cause issues in trying to update your website. So you can technically do your web plug-in updates but some plug-in updates can break websites, so it’s definitely in your best interest to consider having a WordPress web developer doing the plug-in updates versus just the user doing the updates.
It’s also important that the updates are done on what we call a staging version of the website because many different plug-in updates can actually break the website. It happens all the time with WordPress sites. And if it’s done in the live site, your site could go down or it could impact your live version of your website. So anytime we’re doing a plug-in update, it’s done on a staging version of a website. That way it doesn’t impact the live version if something does break.
If you have any questions about car maintenance, don’t ask us because we don’t know. But if you have any questions on how to maintain a WordPress website, definitely let us know.
