Everyone knows that you should back up your devices on a regular basis, but your website needs regular backups too.

Despite how important websites are to building a business, many businesses don’t have a regular backup schedule. However, without backups, your business loses all website changes made since the last backup.

It’s never too late to start scheduling backups to prepare for the worst. While you hope it never happens, being prepared takes only a few minutes and you’ll be glad you did.

1. Cybercriminals Don’t Take Holidays

Cybercriminals don’t care whether you have backups in place or if your business is large or small. Every website is a potential target. A shocking 46% of UK businesses discovered cyber breaches in 2017. While poor passwords and phishing emails are common entry points, poor website security is also a problem.

In a matter of seconds, your website could be compromised, leaving your business without an online presence. Without regular backups, you’re left without any quick way to recover. With a recent backup, you’d be able to upload the backup, patch any vulnerabilities and be back online within a day.

2. Vulnerabilities Happen

WordPress consistently releases updates to create a more secure platform, but vulnerabilities happen. Cybercriminals are always on the lookout for ways to exploit even the tiniest vulnerabilities in the code. WordPress is often targeted because it’s the most widely used CMS, leading to millions of attacks every year.

If you haven’t updated WordPress, your website could be vulnerable. Having regular backups means even if your site is attacked, you can shut it down and recover from a backup. All you’d have to do is update to the most secure version of WordPress before going back online.

It’s also important to note that vulnerabilities in plugins and themes can also cause problems. Ensure you keep these updated as well.

3. Downtime Is Costly

For ecommerce sites, you likely already know how costly downtime is for your business. What you might not have considered is how much site traffic you’re losing when your website’s down. Instead of gaining new customers, potential customers are being directed to your competition.

You want your website back up and running as quickly as possible. This is impossible without regular backups. Every minute your site’s down is costing your business money.

4. Recovering From Scratch Is Impossible

If you’ve never performed a backup, recovery becomes a nightmare. Take a moment to think about how much content is on your website. Could you remember every blog post, product description, About Us details and other content? No one can. Without backups, you’d have to start over completely from scratch should something happen to your website.

5. Simple Human Error Could Erase Everything

Even the most secure website isn’t immune from simple human error. All it would take is someone to click the wrong button to suddenly compromise your website. They might accidentally erase a database or delete a line of code that cripples the site.

Luckily, if you have a recent backup, you’re back up and running in no time. Without it, you’d have to find a way to manually fix any issues and hope it fixes your website.

6. WordPress Changes Go Awry

Sometimes WordPress changes don’t always go as planned. For instance, uploading a new theme might seem simple enough, but after uploading, your visitors just see error messages instead of your website. A new plugin might negatively impact another plugin. A WordPress core update could render an older theme useless. The truth is, making changes isn’t always guaranteed to work out perfectly.

This is why you need regular backups. If changes don’t go well, you just go back to your most recent backup. You can then work to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.

7. Building A Brand Takes Time

Part of the reason you have a website for your business is to build your brand. However, building a brand takes time. You can’t rank high on Google overnight. However, a compromised website can ruin your brand’s reputation in just a few days. Google might penalise your site if it’s not repaired quickly. Plus, visitors may be hesitant to come back after noticing your site’s down for an extended period.

Don’t let all your hard work go to waste. Instead, set up regular backups so you always have a way to get your website back online quickly. Plus, you won’t lose any new content, such as your latest blog post, that keeps visitors coming back.

If your site’s not being backed up regularly, contact me today to find out how to implement easy to use backup plugins today.

Image: Patrick Lindenberg

You carefully planned your website and you’re pleased with the new traffic it’s bringing to your business.

You keep your blog updated and market your site, but you’re forgetting one key step – website maintenance. Maintaining a site is more than just updating content or installing WordPress updates.

Website maintenance is crucial to keeping your site online, providing optimal performance and keeping visitors safer. Whether you do it yourself or hire someone else, make sure these key tasks are covered.

Software Updates

Updating your core software, such as WordPress, along with plugins and themes is one of the most important tasks, but it’s still often overlooked. Updates don’t just deliver new features. They also provide performance and security updates. All you have to do is look at WordPress’s list of version releases to see how vital each one is. For instance, an update in late 2015 took care of a dangerous cross-scripting vulnerability.

Many site owners avoid doing updates because of potential compatibility issues. This is why it’s a good idea to hire a company to do it. If something doesn’t go right, they’ll know how to fix the problem quickly while still keeping you updated.

Site Backups

Updates are important, but what happens if something goes wrong? If you’re backing your site up regularly, you can at least roll back to a recent update, avoiding as much downtime as possible. Ideally, your database should be backed up daily and your files at least weekly. Backups are the quickest and easiest way to recover after a hacked site, bad theme installation or any other major site issue.

Website Optimisation

Don’t assume your site’s fully optimised just because the pages load. Website maintenance involves checking how quickly pages load and determining which elements might be causing poor performance. As Walmart.com discovered, even a single second improvement resulted in a 2% conversion increase. With 57% of visitors leaving sites that take three seconds or longer to load, it’s vital to look at performance and consistently work to optimise your site.

Elements, such as large images and messy coding, often increase loading times. Sometimes it takes a professional to dig deep to uncover what issues your site might have.

Uptime Monitoring

Slow loading pages are one thing, but no one will wait around if your site goes down completely. Uptime monitoring involves seeing how long your site stays up along with total periods of downtime. A site going down is a red flag that something’s wrong, with the exception of planned downtime during low traffic periods. It could mean the site’s been hacked or has a virus. It could indicate a problem with your host or server.

You want your site available at all times. Keeping track of uptime helps you keep your site online as much as possible while catching potential problems early.

Security Scanning

According to WhiteHat Security, 86% of their tested websites had at least one security flaw with 56% having more than one. Hackers don’t care how big or small your site is, they just want access. For instance, getting full access to your site could allow them to send out legitimate looking emails to your email list, infecting each user who opens the message. Unsafe sites are often blocked by Google, leaving visitors seeing the warning message from above.

Security scanning searches for security flaws and viruses on your site and server. While you might not be able to prevent everything, the sooner you do find a problem, the quicker you can resolve it, keeping your site and visitors safe.

Site Tweaks And Updates

Website maintenance is more than security, backups and uptime monitoring. It’s also about making regular tweaks and site updates. For instance, you might want to change your site’s layout or add a new contact form. It’s usually a good idea to make a list of improvements or changes you want to make and take care of a few each month.

Obviously, if you run into bugs or glitches on your site, this goes under the tweaks and updates category. Many site owners rely on a professional company to handle these issues. Some regular maintenance plans include bug fixes and support calls.

Conclusion

Owning a website means having to deal with website maintenance. The two go hand-in-hand. It is a time consuming process, but crucial to your site’s health and performance. You have two main options – do it all yourself or hire someone else. Most site owners opt for the latter to save time and money. Besides, having a professional do it means you know it’s being done right.

Know you need site maintenance, but don’t have time to do it yourself? Don’t worry. Let WP Get Support handle all your site maintenance needs.

Image: Brian Kelly