Save Money on Maintenance
Protect your assets
If you’ve invested time and money building a website, you’ve created a valuable business asset.
Like any business asset you will probably want to protect it and insure it against loss or damage.
Many people like to pay their developer or a ‘concierge’ company to update, backup and maintain their website. In part this is because they don’t feel they have the time or the skill, but mostly because it gives them peace of mind knowing their site is taken care of.
You can, however, save money by managing the backups, updates, security and other regular maintenance tasks yourself.
Master the Art of Website Maintenance and Save Money
Managing the maintenance and monitoring of your web site properly does take time, but it can also save you money. Of course doing no maintenance or monitoring at all is an option, if you are happy just to replace your site from a backup if you need to.
If you would rather skip that step, and use a concierge service for peace of mind, you will know what to look for in a maintenance plan and a web hosting company.
Take Backups via the hosting control panel
Most hosting companies provide a control panel from which you can carry out various tasks, including backing up your site. If anything goes wrong, you should be able to ‘roll back’ the site to an earlier time.
If your hosting company allows you to take your own backups, then you should backup your files and database as soon as the site is built, before important updates and after successfully updating the site.
Backup your WordPress site using a plugin
Install and configure the backup plugin of your choice or ask your developer to do so. Many backup plugins allow you to schedule backups and send them to remote storage such as Google Drive, DropBox or OneDrive automatically. We use the pro version of WP Vivid, but the free version is very good in itself.
Again, you should backup your files and database as soon as the site is built, before important updates and after successfully updating the site.
Security Tightening & Monitoring
Install and configure the security plugins of your choice unless your developer has done that for you already. There are lots of free security plugins to choose from on WordPress.org. many of which have enhanced pro versions that you can invest in. We use a combination of WordPress security plugins and off-site monitoring.
Make sure the security plugin is configured to send you email notification of incidents that require your attention as well as telling you when updates are required.
Automate Updates to Save Money
WordPress will automatically update to the latest version. Themes and plugins can be set to update automatically using an update plugin, but as updates can cause issues in some cases, manual inspection is recommended.
Where major updates are required, backing up the site before and after updating is strongly recommended.
Monitoring
It is a good idea to monitor your site for issues. There are various plugins and 3rd party applications that let you monitor your site for downtime and technical issues, including WordPress itself. You may also want to monitor your site speed.
Stats
Where are your visitors coming from? Which pages do they land on? Which pages do they leave from?
Stats monitoring is something you can do yourself by installing the relevant plugins or software and checking the reports.
Much depends on what you want to track. Visitors, Adverts, 3rd party site referrals etc.
You can use Google or an independent system like Matomo.
