The costs of maintaining a WordPress website are lower than you might think, but running a website requires investing more than just money. Time is one of your organization’s most valuable assets, and unless you have a tiny website with minimal traffic, maintenance takes a lot of time. If you divert your own time, or that of a senior employee, from this task, you divert costly attention from other activities.
On paper it might cost more to hire an agency, but when you consider the time you or another team member will devote to this essential function, outsourcing is more cost-effective in the long run. In evaluating your options, consider that you are investing in the expertise of an entire team rather than relying on yourself to find all the answers as you try to run your business. Read on to find out the activities and costs of monthly website maintenance.
What is maintenance of a WordPress website?
Just like real estate or a car, your website requires maintenance to ensure that it runs smoothly. With businesses investing more than ever in their digital presence, it is critical that your company keep its Web pages in perfect order to remain relevant. If your website contains broken links, outdated information, and dysfunctional themes, it will quickly slip in Google’s search engine results pages. Not only that, but customers are likely to quickly abandon a website that does not seem up to par.
Timely web maintenance is one of the best ways to increase conversions and improve the overall customer experience. This translates into better reputation and ultimately more revenue. Don’t make the mistake of budgeting for hosting, domains, security and advanced plug-ins and themes without considering the ongoing costs associated with keeping the site up-to-date. After all, it is the virtual storefront of your business.
Although you could take on this task yourself, you would be diverting your attention from other areas of business management that require your specific skills. When you outsource, invest in the specialized skills of a team of WordPress experts.
Benefits of website maintenance plans
It is not possible to avoid WordPress maintenance costs, even if you do it yourself. However, the assistance of an agency can help you get the best ROI. Here are some of the benefits you can get with an experienced service team:
Hiring a specialized company is more cost-effective than hiring a single person to do the work.
There is no need to purchase hardware, software or licenses to perform specific tasks.
Webmasters work from a remote location, so it saves office space.
You save time and money by being able to focus on your activities with confidence that the website is under control.
Security, performance, uptime, and SEO will be monitored and optimized, with changes made as they are needed.
You and your team will not have to go through a long and painful learning process for every maintenance task.
Most importantly, your sleek and highly visible website will attract more customers and encourage conversions.
Soprattutto, il vostro sito web, elegante e ben visibile, attirerà più clienti e favorirà le conversioni.
To give you an idea of how exhausting the monthly checkup process of your WordPress site is, here is a checklist showing everything you will need to do. We will also indicate whether there is a cost associated with the task.
Uptime
When running a business with WordPress, uptime is non-negotiable. Free uptime monitoring tools can be accessed, but they usually offer only basic functions. This means that advanced functions, such as SMS messages to notify of problems, are not included. If you choose the do-it-yourself approach to WordPress, you will have to factor in the cost of an upgraded service, such as iThemes or Pingdom.
Updates
You need to update the WordPress core, plug-ins and theme monthly. However, updates do not arrive on your dashboard in a predictable way. You can automate them using a plug-in, but be careful if you choose this option. If there is a conflict with other software or a problem with the code, you may experience downtime or a security breach.
The safest way to do this is also the most time-consuming: manually. The only cost of manual updating is time, but it is about one hour per month.
Backup
Backups are one of the cheapest and easiest aspects of maintaining a WordPress site. It is usually possible to configure them once without cost and not worry about it unless a system restore is needed.
Analysis
When using WordPress, you can gain incredible insights through Google Analytics. This helps you evaluate what works and what doesn’t in order to optimize web pages and increase conversions. It can take a long time and a high level of understanding. One can expect to devote one or two hours per month to get the most out of the analysis.
Security
Cybersecurity is as important as door and window locks. Criminals can use various schemes, such as malware distribution and DDoS attacks, to compromise the company and cause serious damage.
You can install security plug-ins and malware scanners, but you usually cannot program them for free. Therefore, you will have to pay to manually scan for malware and perform other security tasks (at least one hour) or switch to a premium plug-in that will handle it for you.
Visual optimization
You will need to check that your website is optimized for all browsers, including Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. Also, in today’s digital world, it is critical that your site be optimized for mobile and tablet devices. This is time-consuming (30 minutes to an hour), but should be done monthly.
Broken links and unnecessary files
Broken links and website clutter can hide vulnerabilities. You will need to locate broken links and look for unnecessary files, plug-ins, and themes in the WP-content folder. If you do this every month, it should take no more than 15 minutes. But as we all know, time is money.
Database management
You can optimize the database using plug-ins such as Optimize Database and WP-Optimize or multiple site management tools. This should take no more than 15 minutes per month.
Speed optimization
Slow websites cause people to lose positions in search rankings and lose customers. You will need to run a tool at least every month to ensure that all pages take less than five seconds to load. This can take up to an hour using a plug-in such as Google PageSpeed Insights.
Analysis of themes, templates, and plug-ins
You must constantly look for plug-ins that improve the customer experience and increase conversions. In addition, you need to analyze your templates and themes regularly to make sure you are getting the most out of your site. This activity should take about 30 minutes per month.
Unbiased review
One thing you cannot do on your own is to provide an unbiased analysis of your website. You could be the most objective person in the world, but you would still be blind to some aspects of your site, simply because you look at it all day long.
WordPress website maintenance costs
As you can see, you can expect to spend about five to six hours per month on website maintenance. If you opt for do-it-yourself, you will need to invest between $30 and $200 per month for automatic plug-ins and security checks. Custom WordPress sites are much more expensive to manage. Do-it-yourself might be feasible if you are a very small company with only one website.
However, if you operate in more than one language, have e-commerce pages or have more than one site, it is simply not feasible. Surprisingly, the monthly costs for hiring an agency are similar to those for maintaining a WordPress website per month.
