WordPress Web Maintenance What does it consist of? How much?

On many occasions, companies and startups reach a point where the need arises to digitize their company and create their website, usually to save costs they develop it in WordPress, without having much knowledge about web maintenance and all that it entails, in what it consists of or how much it costs.

Next, we are going to clarify any type of doubt about web maintenance, let’s do it.

The importance of web maintenance.

After having made a good investment in your website you need to have everything in order and keep periodic control of all files, files, and security, this is where web maintenance is very important, would you trust as a client of a web page that has security issues? Or would you trust a website that contains broken links or distorted images? As a business, in addition to missing a visit, you may also lose a customer.

It is of little use to have a very elaborate and worked web page if over time we have outdated data within it or we do not know anything about the behavior of the users who visit it, if we cannot implement new improvements, services, and functionalities, we will not get the desired contacts.

What is a web maintenance service?

Web maintenance requires some essential tasks, we have prepared a list of tasks that we think are optimal for proper web maintenance:

• The first thing is security, we must eliminate any vulnerability on our website or at least activate filters that guarantee it.
• Creation of backup, if it is a web page with constant modifications, we recommend at least one weekly backup.
• Assigning permissions to the files hosted on your hosting with special attention to the htaccess file.
• Bug fixes and broken links repair.
• Review of the correct functioning of all the functionalities of the website.
• Review of sitemap.xml and robots.txt
• Optimization of the loading speed.
• Review of the correct operation of forms and subscriptions.
• Updating of services and products.
• In the case of WordPress, updating themes and plugins as well as the CMS itself.
• Installation of the Google Analytics Google Search console code to be able to monitor all the data that users leave behind when browsing your website.
• Review of metadata, the titles, and descriptions that we provide to our URLs are very important for Google and users to correctly interpret what they are going to find, it can also increase your CTR and position you better.

All these tasks guarantee the correct functioning of a web page and allowing the correct functioning of all the strategies that are being carried out in it, lead capture, landing pages, or web positioning.

Prevention is better than cure, don’t you think?

How much does a correct web maintenance cost

Let’s see, here you have to apply a little common sense, in décimoarte we usually offer this service from € 20 / month, although if you want more advanced maintenance you can go to  € 30 / hour depending on reviews, content updates, repairs or corrections that have to be applied, another quite common solution is to buy a bag of maintenance hours, that is, if you have to detail very well what is going to be carried out.

Depending on the size of the project, it may be more expensive to review everything, so normally the price will go up, but as we tell you basic maintenance with backup copies, updating of Plugins, Themes and WordPress should not cost more than € 20/25 per month.

Practical cases that can come in handy

Failed plugin updates

What can I do if a plugin that I just updated on my WordPress website has created a conflict and there are certain functionalities that are not working correctly?

In this case, we recommend you go back to the previous version of the plugin, if you do not know how to do it we recommend this WP Rollback plugin, you will have available all the previous versions of the plugin that did not work correctly, by the way, try to update plugin to plugin not all to this will make it easier for you to identify a possible problem.

Problems with Gutenberg (the new WordPress editor)

With the latest WordPress update, Gutenberg (its new editor) is installed, which, in some versions of certain themes, cancels its editor, which is a big problem because you cannot modify or structure your content, the solution also exists, a plugin called No-Gutenberg , install it and you can continue editing the contents with the block editor of your theme.

Failed WordPress updates

If you have decided to update your WordPress to the latest version, we recommend that you first make a backup copy of both the database and the files so that you can restore it if something goes wrong. We recommend the XCloner plugin with which you can easily restore your WordPress version.

This process can also be done via FTP or via server, you would have to download from WordPress.com the version of WordPress with which you were running previously, once downloaded select all the files and folders except the WP-content folder, delete all the files from the FTP less the mentioned folder and the WP-Config.php file, upload the version that you have downloaded, it is very important that you do not touch the WP-content folder since if you delete it you will lose all your contents as well as the WP-Config file .php that connects your database with your WordPress.

conclusion

As you can see, web maintenance is of great importance in the immediate future of your website, you must always maintain a certain control and some guidelines to follow so as not to get an unpleasant surprise, so we advise you to be aware of all these aspects of the maintenance of your website if you think you are not ready to do so, hire someone qualified for this purpose.