Your organization? Busy supporting people and making the community better.
Your website? Supporting you at every step.
This is why website maintenance is like feeding your online presence, it’s essential nutrients. Maintenance is necessary to keep your site running smoothly and supporting your goals — welcoming visitors, generating support, and showcasing the amazing organization that you are. But here’s what we’ve noticed: the word “maintenance” can mean different things to different people. At Boomerang, we love clarity so we’re breaking it down to avoid any confusion or misunderstanding.
There are two types of website maintenance (and you definitely need both).
1. Maintaining your content. After launching your WordPress website, everything is fresh, new and accurate. Beyond that, content updates will be needed. Adding new blog posts, announcing exciting events, introducing new team members, and keeping your website’s words and pictures current. And guess what? We build our websites with user-friendly tools that empower you to make updates and additions yourself. (Don’t worry, as part of our delivery process, we’ll show you how!) We refer to this type of maintenance as “updating content.”
2. Maintaining your website’s operation. For us, the word “maintenance” is really about keeping the WordPress Core file current, updating plugins, and verifying security settings. It’s about keeping the foundation and functionality of your site up-to-date to avoid any issues with functionality. A website with outdated WordPress and plugin versions becomes vulnerable to security, hacks and broken elements. This kind of website maintenance ensures:
- A hacker doesn’t infiltrate your site
- Your website isn’t suddenly full of strange GIFs
- Your website doesn’t suddenly break because of compatibility issues with plugins/WordPress
- You don’t find yourself site-less, without a backup
- Your site stays secure, strong, and visible!
It’s essential to make this distinction and confirm with your team who will be responsible for what. Too often, we hear, “Oh, our Development Director maintains our website and does that.” However, when we talk to that person, they don’t know how or haven’t been doing the updates. We highly recommend explicitly assigning this role to someone.
We don’t mind if you say tomato or to-mah-to. We don’t mind if you prefer french fries to onion rings, or don’t eat fried foods at all. What do we care about? That your website is awesomely-functional and immensely-helpful in supporting your organization’s mission.
At Boomerang Marketing, we offer WordPress website design and transparently priced, robust, and worry-free website hosting and maintenance plans.
Are you doing both kinds of website maintenance? Let’s talk about it.