Many freelancers and agencies I am sure would echo my following statement. There are many projects that we do for clients that end up beautiful but stagnate and are never properly taken care of.
Campaign sites fall into this trap all the time, but a surprising amount of company websites do too. In a way, this is remarkable. Regardless of the system that you build a website with today, it is going to evolve over time.
Not only does this mean new features, but also means security updates. Nobody should have any doubts about the importance of security anymore. Over the past years, it would seem as though security scandals and hackers causing havoc are only becoming more frequent.
Yet, most companies still choose not to have proper technical maintenance of their websites done frequently. We advocate a maintenance plan with every site that we build because we know that security releases come out all the time and is something you should stay on top of.
It doesn’t matter that it is really easy to update sites today. Even with WordPress’ dead simple updater, it is still our experience that people just don’t do it. Then one day they were hacked because of the outdated plugin, or because of the known security hole that was patched months ago. It is easily preventable.
What I am saying here is that you should not neglect the technical maintenance of your website. Yes, I know it isn’t something you feel comfortable doing, or something that you really want to spend time on. That’s why you can hire somebody to take care of it for you.
It is important to keep your site and server environment technically up to date to prevent them from being hacked, which is surely going to be a greater pain than having someone take care of it for you.
So I urge you, make sure you have someone taking care of your maintenance, including proper backups, on a regular basis. It’s well worth the (very reasonable) cost.
Photo from Flickr by David Precious.
