From a technical perspective – you want to keep your website both safe and bang-up-to-date. But what happens when changes happen that you weren’t aware were coming down the tracks? One of the queries we often get is “Should I hit ‘update’ when I get notifications of upgrades for my website”. And unless you know what you are doing – the answer is probably no!
WordPress updates are a good example. Bear in mind WordPress is extremely popular, with over 40% of the world’s websites being powered by it. So if an update goes wrong, it can leave a lot of websites in disarray. In fact, a major new update has just come out. WordPress 6.3 brings easy-to-use features, like making your site look better and organising content more smoothly. Plus, you can quickly switch between different “looks” for your site.
So, you might have been tempted to do the upgrade yourself. In which case you may well have discovered that this update had a few “surprises”. One of them being that the presentation of many sites went skew-ways, leaving live sites looking badly designed and potentially damaging the professional reputation of certain businesses. But any update can be problematic because often a new version of WP or a plug-in that might be on your site can potentially be incompatible with other plug-ins or code on the site – and there’s no way of knowing this in advance.
What to do? You are probably in the business of managing or running a company, not doing tech support and sifting through code to find exactly what has broken and why. So, this really is a job for the experts – but luckily and typically its not a big one!
Website Support and Maintenance
WordPress itself and all the common plug-ins that are typically used on WP sites e.g. the Cookie one, contact forms, distributor searches etc – are regularly updated to newer versions – either to add functionality or to block a hack.
So, usually its best advice to do these updates. Hackers are digital troublemakers and we are often contacted with sites being infected by worms (as unpleasant as it sounds), having porn being published on their web pages, being taken down etc. Often this is facilitated and possible by the fact that the site hasn’t been maintained. And it’s a lot more hassle and cost to reverse these kinds of problems than it is to avoid them in the first place.
Inspiration’s Annual Maintenance and Support (AMS) service is like a shield for your website. Every month we check for hacks, upgrade plug-ins/WP if an upgrade is available, take a back-up of the site and if there is a hack, we replace the hacked site with the last clean back-up – all within the fee. For most sites the fee is less than €1,000 per annum. And with plenty more updates coming down the line, the risk of not maintaining your site increases year on year.
Take a look at everything Inspiration can offer for AMS, and [email protected] if you want to implement this service. It just makes sense.
