A website does need maintenance. In today’s world of constant change, you cannot just create a website and then let it sit idle. Maintenance is an essential aspect of any website’s online presence. How do you calculate WordPress maintenance costs? Here are the 7 things you should consider for WordPress Maintenance.
1. Security Monitoring
Your site needs to be monitored for security. Security monitoring includes threat-detection, malware scanning, and other security measures. Depending on your needs, you can hire a professional security agency to look after the security of your website, switch to a secure Managed WordPress hosting, or install a premium WordPress security plugin.
Here is a list of 10 security plugins you can use for security monitoring. If you are running a WooCommerce store, here is a complete guide to WooCommerce security.
2. Security Clean Up
There is a lot of security-related clean up you might have to do if you want to keep your site functioning optimally. This can take time. You should consider the cost of this time when you want to calculate the maintenance cost.
Here are some things that you need to consider in security clean up of your website:
- Users that no longer use your website
- Old user database and passwords
- Generating new WordPress security keys
- Cleaning spam comments
- Organizing content
- Removing redundant tags
Clean up can be a time-consuming task. So you should consider the value of your time while calculating clean up costs.
3. Uptime Monitoring
The aim of having a website is that it is accessible when your customers (or your leads) visit. What if your website is down? You may lose a lot. Try calculating the downtime costs to get a realistic picture for yourself.
Premium services like Pingdom offer uptime monitoring as well. If you are with Nestify, uptime monitoring is included with every Managed WordPress hosting plan. Having a Managed WordPress Host makes WordPress management a whole lot convenient.
4. Speed Optimization
If you are not considering speed optimization in WordPress maintenance, then you are probably not doing any maintenance at all. Speed matters, and therefore, it is the key factor that needs to be optimized.
Try using these speed test tools to check how fast your website is. If you are using Google PageSpeed Insights, then this article can help you score maximum.
Have a look at these 9 tips to improve page speed.
5. Backup and Restore
It is very important that you keep a backup copy of your website regularly. You may need to restore your backup when doing maintenance tasks.
You can use these backup plugins for creating backups. With Managed WordPress Hosting of Nestify, you get automatic backups and one-click restore. This saves a lot of inconvenience and headaches. As your premium host, Nestify takes care of your site’s backup and restore operation like a pro. This is an important reason why you should consider switching to Managed WordPress Host like Nestify.
6.WordPress Updates
As such, WordPress updates are free. So why do you need to consider them in maintenance costs? It is all related to the value of your time. It is not just the time of updating the WordPress but it is also about checking if everything is working fine after the update.
Sometimes an update can break your site. Your site may malfunction due to a plugin or theme conflict. At such times, you may need to do some troubleshooting and figure out the best way to deal with the problem. This can include hiring a WordPress developer to deal with the problem.
The same can be said if you fail to apply updates and your site becomes outdated, vulnerable to security threats. Then, it takes time to update everything and ensure that it works just fine with updates.
This is also a reason to switch to premium managed WordPress Hosting like Nestify. Nestify takes care of WordPress updates as and when they happen with robust testing and customer support.
7.Website Edits
Depending on your needs, you may want to edit the content of your website’s home page, contact page, service page, or blog page from time to time.
You may want to add or remove design elements, add a specific function to your website, or make some change. These are called website edits. Some website edits require professional supervision while some can be done on your own.
Like other things on this list, consider the time as well as expertise costs while calculating maintenance costs.
So these were some of the key aspects to consider while calculating WordPress maintenance costs. You can easily see that WordPress maintenance is a serious business. That’s why we recommend Managed WordPress Hosting. Try Nestify’s WordPress Hosting platform and see for yourself how easy it becomes to manage WordPress.