Many organizations realize the importance of maintaining proper care of their business in terms of landscaping, cleaning, adding new tracking systems and networking, but an often overlooked but equally fundamental aspect of maintaining your business is website CMS maintenance.
Regardless of whether you are using Wordpress, Joomla!, Drupal or any other CMS software you need to be properly maintaining your website CMS software on a regular and on-going basis.
For things we own in the real world, the importance of maintenance and upkeep are an obvious part of sustaining the investment we’ve made. We do maintenance not because we want to, but because it must be done in order to keep our posessions in good working order.
Digital assets need upkeep too
It is easy to forget that digital assets like websites need maintenance too. A neglected website is just as obvious to users, and says just as much about its owner as a neglected building. Perhaps more importantly, neglected websites are prime targets for malicious agents to hack. Websites that get hacked are almost always running old software with security holes and if you have not been keeping up with your website maintenace chances are you don't have a recent backup of your website either.
So what is a business owner to do? The answer is easy - you hire a professional to take care of it for you. Then you don't have to worry whether your website is being maintained and whether you have a backup of your website - you know you do.
What is CMS website maintenance?
Maintaining a CMS is a collection of activities that keep your site secure, stable and running smoothly. These include keeping your core software up to date, keeping your plugins & components up to date, taking regular website backups, running compatibility checks, checking for broken links, and more.
Why is CMS maintenance important?
First, it will improve the security and stability of your digital platform. For open source content management systems there is a constant crush of hackers trying to crack sites and access your information, steal your client information and infect your website with malware. One of the main challenges with CMS websites is that once an exploit is discovered, it can usually be exploited in other sites with the same vulnerability.
A website running an older or out-of-date version of software is automatically at a higher security risk than one that is running the latest version. The same is true of added plugins and components you may be using.
Customer experience is also negatively impacted on websites running old software. Broken links, broken functionality or lack of compatibility on select devices will lower trust in your organization, impact sales due to a poor user experience and increase your users frustration.
You should also keep in mind that the longer you wait to update your software and plugins the more likely that when it is updated you will run into compatibility issues making what should have been an easy and straightforward task into a difficult one.
How Waves Web Design can help
Waves Web Design has been building and maintaining websites since 2003! We have the expertise and experience to keep your website healthy and running smoothly. We can make suggestions on what changes you need to make in your protocols to reduce your risk of hacking, better convert your visitors into clients and keep your website looking fresh and working like a champ.