Why You Should Hire a Professional to Maintain Your WordPress Website

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Your website is an important asset for your business. It’s your online storefront, your way of connecting with potential customers or constituents, and a key part of your marketing and communications strategy. But even the best WordPress websites need regular maintenance to keep them running smoothly and securely.

If you want stability and performance from your WordPress website, it requires a commitment to routine maintenance. At its core, that entails logging into the WordPress dashboard every day to install available updates and troubleshoot conflicts. This may sound simple enough and you might be wondering why the best approach would be to just turn on the auto-update feature. Problem-solved, right?

While the process of maintaining a WordPress website has improved dramatically, it is still not entirely user-friendly. That’s because there are a lot of moving parts. A big part of site maintenance involves keeping legacy themes and plugins working. There are instances where an update to one critical plugin requires upgrading or even downgrading your version of PHP. It can also be difficult to figure out why theme and plugin conflicts are happening.

Here are just a few reasons why you should hire a professional to maintain your website:

  • Security: Hackers are always looking for ways to exploit vulnerabilities in websites. A professional website maintenance company will keep your website up to date with the latest security patches and software updates, helping to protect your website from attack.
  • Performance: A website that is slow or unresponsive can frustrate visitors and lead to lost sales. A professional website maintenance company can help to optimize your website for speed and performance, ensuring that your visitors have a positive experience.
  • Content: A well-maintained website will always have fresh, informative content. A professional website maintenance company can help you to create and manage your website content, ensuring that it is always up-to-date and engaging.
  • Backups: It’s important to have regular backups of your website in case of a disaster. A professional website maintenance company can help you to create and manage backups of your website, so that you can restore it quickly and easily in the event of a problem.

If you’re serious about your business, then you should invest in professional website maintenance. A professional website maintenance company can help to keep your website running smoothly, securely, and efficiently.

Here are some additional benefits of hiring a professional website maintenance company:

  • Peace of mind: Knowing that your website is in the hands of a professional can give you peace of mind. You can focus on running your business, knowing that your website is being taken care of.
  • Expertise: A professional website maintenance company has the expertise and experience to keep your website running smoothly. They will be able to identify and fix problems quickly and efficiently.
  • Cost-effectiveness: In the long run, it can be more cost-effective to hire a professional website maintenance company than to try to do it yourself. This is because you will avoid the cost of downtime, lost sales, and data breaches.

If you are considering hiring a professional website maintenance company, there are a few things you should keep in mind:

  • Make sure the company is reputable. Check the company’s references and ask about their experience.
  • Get a written estimate. This will help you to budget for the cost of maintenance.
  • Make sure the company offers a service level agreement (SLA). This will guarantee that the company will fix any problems that occur within a certain time frame.

By following these tips, you can be sure to find a professional website maintenance company that can help you to keep your website running smoothly and securely.

WordPress Hosting With Connect4 Consulting – Your Website Bodyguard, Handyman, and Paramedic

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WordPress is now used by nearly 80% of all websites. One of the drivers of that recent growth is ease of installation, maintenance, and low cost. After all, a Google search for wordpress hosting reveals hosting plans for as little as $3.99/month. So why would you want to pay Connect4 Consulting $50/month for hosting?

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Imagine that you’ve just built your dream house. You have spent thousands of hours of time pouring your heart into every detail. Paying $3.99/month for hosting is like setting that dream house in a bad neighborhood and leaving the door ajar while you sleep inside. Sure, you’re saving $46.01/month, but you have to clean, maintain, fix, and protect the house yourself 24 hours a day. This leaves you with very little time to enjoy your dream house and requires that you are both the bodyguard, the handyman, and the paramedic.

Hosting plans at Connect4 Consulting start at $50 per month because we are your website bodyguard, handyman, and paramedic.

Connect4 Consulting actively monitors activity on your website to protect it from hackers. More than 30,000 websites a day were hacked in 2013. There are different methods of attack, but one is via simple guesswork and attempting to log in. If an IP fails at log in repeatedly, we will block that IP address. However, the most successful method of prevention and protection is via updates. WordPress sites rely on a variety of smaller programs and plugins in addition to the WordPress code itself. Whenever updates are available, we test them and then update sites immediately. Most plugin and wordpress core updates include security updates.

Many people believe that viruses are distributed from adult and gambling sites, but in reality the majority of these 30,000 websites are legitimate small businesses that are unwittingly distributing malicious code for the cyber criminals. These cyber criminals have automated scanning tools that scour the web looking for unsecure websites to infect and deploy their malicious code. This is another reason why it’s important to have someone actively monitoring and maintaining your website.

You might be thinking “Couldn’t I update the plugins myself?”

Well you could, and most of the time you would be fine, but every once in a while one update doesn’t get along with another update. As an example, the most recent update to WordPress rendered the Go Portfolio plugin invisible. There’s nothing quite as useless as a sorting portfolio plugin that doesn’t display any photos. When something like this happens, we need to figure out what’s causing the problem. Is it a problem specific to the plugin, the wordpress update, or something else? Is there an update for the plugin? If not, is it safe not to update WordPress (the answer is no)? Do we have to find and configure another plugin with the same functionality? If one doesn’t exist, do we have to create our own custom plugin? What do we do in the meantime so that website visitors see pictures in their portfolio? Connect4 Consulting answers these questions so you don’t have to. Most of the time all of this is going on behind the scenes and you don’t know about it. If you know about it, we aren’t doing a good enough job.

Unless you are intimately familiar with backup processes, restores, php tables, etc., you are probably not your website’s best paramedic.

Even with ongoing proactive maintenance, sometimes bad things happen and you go to check your website and all you see is just a blank page or an error message. With that $3.99/month plan, you are out of luck and will likely be scrambling to find someone to fix your site for you. You will need to be able to tell that person what you think is causing the problem and you will need all of the various administrative usernames and passwords. That person is going to charge a hefty hourly fee and you could easily spend more than a thousand dollars restoring or fixing your website.

Hosting your website at Connect4 Consulting means that you get expert assistance if bad things happen to your web site. We can immediately address your problem and roll back your website to a previous update while we figure out exactly what caused the problem in the first place. We can do this because we have an ongoing relationship with you and your website. We are your website bodyguard, handyman, and paramedic.