WordPress Updates and Maintenance. Not exactly the fun stuff to talk about, but it's absolutely necessary to keeping your vital business asset protected.

I've shared ways you can do your own maintenance and if you're deciding whether to go it alone and maintain and update your WordPress site yourself, or hire a professional, you should carefully consider your options to see what might be best for you right now.

One option you ABSOLUTELY must not choose is thinking that you're a small website and therefore don't need to keep your website maintained and secure. Hackers are indiscriminate and seek out non-maintained non-secure sites because they are the easiest to break.

The big decision comes to whether or not you want to hire out and have someone else maintain your website or tackle the job and do it yourself.

Both ways can and do work, it really comes down to your personal choice and how much you value your time.

Let's cover both. My intention here is to help you see both sides and give you some helpful insight into what you need to consider and look out for when it comes to maintaining your website.

But first, I like to share this thought that you should consider when it comes to maintaining and keeping your site secure. Your website is much like your car. Not maintaining our care with regular maintenance such as oil changes and new tires, maintaining our website is just as important.

A neglected website is just a door left ajar for someone to come and take down your website and in the long run, getting someone to clean up your website is usually more costly than investing the money or time & effort depending on how you manage your maintenance.

Website maintenance is NON-Negotiable! So choose one option, but you need to choose.

Option 1: Do it yourself

Yahoo! You got yourself a bright shiny new website.

It's exciting and you're excited to share your new digital home with the world. While creating a brand new website and launching a new product or service is exciting it comes with a lot of management and upkeep.

Doing the maintenance on your own website is doable, but there's a lot to learn to ensure you're doing all the things to keep your website secure and well maintained. This goes beyond simply doing the updates of your theme and plugins.

As soon as your website is up and running, it’s time to start taking care of the most basic and crucial web maintenance tasks. You can read in more detail all the numerous steps you need to take in this article

You'll need to make sure you have a reliable backup service in place that is fully backing up your website and storing your backup away from where you host your website.

I recommend UpdraftPlus (affiliate link) for ease of use.

Then if something happens you'll need to know the steps to troubleshoot this issue if you're site experiences something like:

A few of the things you may encounter:

• Blank front page
• Inability to sign in to the admin interface to restore from a backup point
• Error codes
• Loss of functionality in certain areas of your site

There are so many other scenarios that may come up and if you are not familiar with the way things work and how to troubleshoot and fix things if something goes wrong, you risk downtime, and even worse, your site may be so affected that you may have to hire a developer or programmer to fix it for you. As you can clearly see, the cost can be great.

Option #2 Hire Someone

Okay, I'll admit I'm biased to this option because it helps pay my bills but the reality is hiring someone to manage your website maintenance and security is the most proactive and best solution.

My Protection Plans provide a different level of service depending on your current needs.

Most website maintenance services will give you peace of mind knowing that your website is well protected allowing you to focus on the important parts of your business that help YOU generate revenue.

Many of my clients have told me just how much they appreciate the service knowing that their website is well taken care of and they can enjoy their business and spend time on what's important to them.

What should you look for in a website maintenance service?

It really depends on your needs but at a minimum, you should look for a service that provides:

• Regular and ongoing off-site backups
• Regular updates of both WordPress core and plugins
• Troubleshooting should there be an issue with the updates
• Monitoring for both uptime, performance, and possibly SEO tracking

These are just a few of the features you should look for when it comes to maintaining our website. Now that you have a clearer idea of what you need to be doing in terms of maintaining your website which is your option?

Got questions about my Geek in Your Pocket service? Get in touch, I'd love to have a conversation to see how I can help.