Why Do I Need Ongoing Website Maintenance?

Serving up a website involves many layers of technology that all rely on each other, and rely on current up-to-date versions to work and remain secure. All of these layers of technology are constantly updating to keep up with the latest technologies and security patches. They all play off of each other in such a way that if one updates, eventually the others will also in order to keep pace. Older versions eventually become deprecated and over time are no longer supported.

The Short Answer

Everything needs to be kept up-to-date to current versions for everything to continue to work together, and MOST IMPORTANTLY so that everything remains secure. Think of it like your desktop operating system, perhaps like Windows Vista that programs run on…same principal. If you didn’t keep things up-to-date it would be like trying to run Office 2011 on an old Windows 98 operating system, running on a 7 year old laptop (hard to imagine any computer having a lifespan of more than about 4 years or less these days). If you didn’t login to your computer for about 8 months you know that you’d have tons of security patches and updates to load before you can do anything. So it is with WordPress, plugins, and themes. Everything needs to be kept current by constantly running the latest ‘updates’.

What if I don’t do regular maintenance updates?

Think about it like going to the dentist. Most people don’t like the dentist, and put it off. If you ignore doing regular check-ups and teeth cleaning, which are normally done twice per year or so, you will end up with cavities and probably an expensive root canal or two. Way more painful both in terms of actual pain and pain in the wallet by hundreds of dollars more.

For your website, regular updates are what keeps the site secure and working over time.

Without regular maintenance updates most sites would not work after about 9 months, and would probably be hacked, causing lots of grief and additional cost.

In such case you’d have to incur cost (~$1,000-$3,000) to build a new website in about a year or two using the then current technology…and this cycle repeats itself every couple of years.

So you either pay a little to maintain as you go (the cost of doing business, but in this case a minor incremental cost), or you end up with a broken and insecure site that needs to be entirely rebuilt with current technology, at great cost.

Makes the old adage come to mind…‘a stitch in time saves 9’…and in this case its 9 times the cost we are talking about.