Chances are, you spent a lot of time, effort and money to ensure your website reflects the soul of your business and highlights the incredible products or services you provide. But a good website gets updated frequently, and the best websites ensure they get critical updates needed to perform at their best and create a positive user experience that drives conversions.
So how do you make sure your website is updated, secure and fast along with sales-focused and on-brand? You get help from Orlando’s longest-running (est 2011, running WordPress since 2008) and most experienced WordPress support and maintenance professionals at Highforge. And trust us, you need it. Let’s explore why.
About WordPress Websites
WordPress has evolved into a robust website builder and a powerful content management system (CMS). Most users love it because it’s relatively easy to use, and it’s completely customizable.
WordPress websites can be customized using plugins. Features like a contact form plugin, an analytics plugin and a search engine optimization plugin are savvy business tools for your operations that help facilitate a better user experience for your customers.
One of the reasons the Orlando Highforge team supports WordPress is because it was built with search engine traffic top of mind. Search engines love WordPress websites, and that love helps your site rank higher than websites built with a different platform.
Plus it’s tried, tested and not going anywhere. Nearly 45% of all websites currently online are powered by WordPress, including many top brands.
Why you Need WordPress Support and Maintenance
Security
Strong WordPress support and maintenance service are critical to ensuring your site is stable, fast and secure. A secure site is unattractive to hackers and other security threats that can harm your business and your customer’s privacy. This is the number one reason to have professional WordPress support in Orlando. Your site getting hacked and having customer information stolen is a hard lesson you can’t afford. Additionally we’ve seen sites get hacked, but the bad guys don’t do anything you’d notice. They start stealing resources from your host and/or they install secret phishing websites in subdirectories or they hijack your search engine rankings to redirect traffic to bad websites. Having a 24/7 security team monitoring your website and keeping it hardened against attacks is something no business should be without.
Speed
A fast site can get bogged down quickly without staying on top of the many WordPress updates that are routinely issued—typically multiple per month. These are aimed at improving the performance and the security of your site. Without them, your site is at risk.
Optimizing your website to be fast is a critical task for Highforge’s WordPress support and maintenance. After all, page speed is one of the factors used by Google to rank websites. Optimizing your code, scripts and database as well as your content can improve site speed. Let us handle that for you with our WordPress Managed Support Services.
Plugins
Then there are the plugins. So many plugins. Plugins for every cool feature you want to bring to life on your website. More than 50,000 plugins are available to enhance the functionality of your website. But the fact is, the more plugins, code and pages you add to your website, the greater the chances are that it will be hacked, slow or both.
Furthermore, installing new plugins, updating existing ones, even updating themes or the WordPress version itself can break your site. Make sure you hire one of the best WordPress support and maintenance companies in the world. Companies like Highforge will set up and run staging copies of your site to test new themes, programming and plugins without risking your site being down.
Conversions & UX
No matter what industry or market you’re in, customers can be finicky. Their behavior constantly changes, so the ability to react quickly to those changes is crucial for a sustainable business. If your website is an important revenue stream for business, you need to be agile.
What if your conversions suddenly drop? Do you have the tools you need to investigate it, understand the cause and rectify it quickly? You will with proper Orlando WordPress support and maintenance. For example, Highforge’s standard plan offers Google Analytics set up and tracking, which is key to measuring your site’s performance against your conversion goals.
Content Updates
While WordPress does make it easy to do content updates yourself, a lot of our clients would prefer to never have to log in as admin and see the backend of their website. They’d prefer a white-glove service that takes anything they send over by email and adds it to the website looking like a million bucks with perfect coding and layouts. Make sure your website support agency also offers content updates with their maintenance packages to cover this and any other requests you might have each month.
Risks of Not Having Support and Maintenance
Managing a website is an ongoing project. You are always creating new content, optimizing your site for SEO and continuing to develop features to enhance your business.
On the backend, however, your WordPress site may experience errors if you don’t know how to properly support it. Just like any software used on your desktop or phone, it needs to be regularly updated. In addition to risking the security and performance of the site, a poorly maintained site can result in a poor user experience, decreased conversions, waning search rankings and more.
By utilizing Highforge, a best-in-class WordPress support and maintenance service provider, you can stay focused on growing your business and brand. We’ll keep your WordPress site secure and fast while also increasing web traffic, optimizing conversions and increasing your revenue.
