When you hear the phrase ‘website maintenance’ what do you think about? Keeping your pictures up to date? Your service pages and class info current? Your contact forms checked?

Sure, those things are important. But did you know there are even more important things to be done on the backend if you want to keep your website safe, secure and functional? 

No? 

Then read on to avoid these five common mistakes…

Mistake #1: Doing no maintenance at all!

Just like our dog training behaviors, websites degrade with a lack of maintenance.

If your website is hacked it can critically harm your business reputation, the trust your clients have in you, and even impede your ability to do business. Imagine that the first time a potential client comes to your website, your site has been hacked and has ads for male enhancement products… or worse! 

They’re going to assume that either you’re not very professional or you’re out of business and go elsewhere. 

Unfortunately, being a small business doesn’t mean you’ll automatically fly under a hacker’s radar. Being small decreases the likelihood that somebody’s going to one-on-one attack you, but generally hackers aren’t looking for that. 

Instead, what they’re looking for is every website that has XYZ plugin or theme installed. “Let me go see which sites have that plugin, and then let me mass attack,” is the hacker’s mindset. They’re trying to get any site they can to redirect to something that gets them money. 

Performing regular website maintenance is the single biggest action you can take to keep your website secure. Updates to your website’s theme, plugins, or CMS should be done promptly to ensure things stay safe! 

This is why, when doing a client website design, we use premium themes and plugins – premium plugins are more likely to receive regular code review from their developers. Using them helps ensure those developers are invested in finding and fixing vulnerabilities in their code. 

But those fixes do no good if they’re not applied – so you need to ensure you’re keeping everything up to date. 

Mistake #2: Relying on your hosting company for backups. 

It is super important that you’re keeping backups of your website. Reputable hosting companies take, and keep, regular website backups for you – which is awesome, because if you do something to break your website, there’s a good chance that your hosting company’s backup can be restored to fix the issue. 

But if something goes wrong and your website is offline, it’s possible your hosting company may be involved in the problem, in which case their backup isn’t enough. 

To offer up just two examples… 

Hosting has lapsed

Often, when our clients reach out, it’s because they’ve accidentally let their hosting lapse. They missed the renewal notices, or maybe their credit card expired. For whatever reason, they didn’t pay hosting fees for so long that the hosting company has deleted all their data. That means no more backups. And that also means your website’s down, and you don’t have any way to get it back – unless you have access to additional saved backups in another location. Redundancy is definitely your friend here!

Hosting companies are not disaster proof 

One of the popular hosting companies had a fire in their server location – the place where they stored their servers – and it took a bunch of their client sites offline… without access to backups. 

That’s why we recommend keeping multiple backups in multiple places. 

What to do to keep your backups safe

We recommend pulling a manual backup of your website at least once a month and making sure that you are either downloading it to your computer, to Dropbox – or even uploading it to Google Drive – anywhere you’re not going to lose it even if something happens to your server, or your hosting company. 

We usually recommend that people keep the two most recent copies that they’ve downloaded. For example, if it’s now time to pull your October backup, and you already have a September backup, keep both. When you go to pull your November back up, then it’s okay to delete the one from September. 

Why at least two? We recommend this process because sometimes it’s possible something went wrong with your site, and you didn’t notice right away. 

It’s far better to have that last copy, just to be extra safe. They’re not usually huge files, so they shouldn’t eat up all your storage. 

Mistake #3: Lacking a disaster plan

While it’s a good idea to keep backups in multiple places, you should also have a disaster recovery plan. So, what does that process look like for you? 

If you’re one of our maintenance clients, you can just contact us. We then do the problem solving and digging for you. Easy!

If you’re not one of our clients, your process is probably going to involve contacting your hosting company and trying to determine what caused your site to go down.

• Is your website hosting company temporarily offline?
• Has something gone wrong on your hosting end? Do you need to contact them to let them know that your website is down, so they can do something on their end to bring it back up?
• Did something go wrong with your domain registration… or maybe you let it lapse?
• Is there something else that you did that could have broken your site?

Easy fixes

You’re good to go if your domain and hosting are correct and something just went wrong with the website itself – you can restore it to your most recent backup, and then put things in place to avoid it going back down. 

For example, if the most recent WordPress release auto-updated and caused a conflict with your theme that took your site down, you can restore to a recent backup. Then, after you restore the backup, you can set auto updates to skip this WordPress update or set it to wait a week. Waiting will give your theme a chance to release their own update to keep things working correctly. 

Hosting headaches

However, if the problem is with your hosting, then you need to determine when things will be back online. That means reaching out to your hosting company and asking their support if they have an estimated time for being back online. If they don’t have a plan, or don’t anticipate being back online in 72 hours or more, then you need to know how to transfer your site elsewhere. 

Note that moving your website hosting is likely to take at least 24 to 48 hours. The process to redirect your domain name to a new hosting company often takes that long to propagate. 

Also, be aware that if your domain name is registered with your hosting company, and your hosting company’s having major malfunctions, you may not have access to set up alternative hosting right away. 

Domain disasters

If your domain expired, you need to figure out if you’re out of your renewal period. Usually, you have a short grace period after your domain expires to re-register it before it gets sold to the next highest bidder. 

But that period isn’t long, and you need to make sure that you’ve renewed it during that time. If not, and you can repurchase it, great. Go ahead and repurchase it. You got lucky. If you can’t repurchase it, then unfortunately you’ll need to choose a new domain name. 

If you’re a maintenance client, we diagnose this stuff for you. Your emergency disaster recovery plan is ‘contact us.’ 

Mistake #4: Trying to DIY (Do It Yourself)

If we create a website for you, we try to make sure you can DIY basic maintenance, if that’s truly what you want to do. We even record a little How-To video and walk you through the processes. 

But it’s worth really taking some time to consider:

1. Is it the best use of your time? What else could you be doing with that time?
2. Are you dedicated to staying on top of it? If not, there’s a chance your website could get hacked, or something could go wrong. 

Paying for website maintenance is a bit like paying for car insurance – if things go wrong, you become our top priority until things are fixed. But unlike car insurance, we also work to ensure nothing goes wrong in the first place! 

For our maintenance clients, we manually check the site on a month-to-month basis to proactively make sure things are working correctly. 

Mistake #5: Lack of expertise

As a business owner, do you know what you’re doing in the backend of your website? Can you honestly say you know what will happen if you click ‘that’ check box or push ‘the other’ button? 

We frequently see people who are super confident and say, “Yeah, I’m going to do it all myself.” But then something goes wrong, and they find they don’t have a clue how to handle the problem. It’s a case of not knowing what they don’t know!

It’s not uncommon for us to have folks with a problem reach out and not remember where to login, which services handle which aspects of their website, or where to find licensing data. The list of moving parts needed to keep your website functioning correctly is long and sometimes complicated. 

And that means there’s plenty of room for human error to make things worse!

What you’re REALLY paying for with a maintenance plan is experience and know-how. When everything hits the fan, a professional provider makes sure your website gets fixed quickly. And it stays fixed, because it’s been dealt with correctly.

Although we do our best to help everyone, we do have limited availability. If we built your website but you’re not on our maintenance plan, we’ll get back to you as soon as we can, but there’s no guarantee that we’ll immediately be able to help you fix whatever went wrong. 

(As a bonus, if you ARE on our maintenance plan, you also get help with other things like updating text, pictures, and pages – or whatever you need. We include up to an hour of additional help per month for all sorts of other tasks.) 

As you can see, there’s a fair bit of technical detail that goes into keeping your website up to date and properly maintained. And if you drop the ball, or you don’t have the expertise to fix it yourself, it can lead to some serious headaches. 

Want to hear more about our maintenance plan? Get in touch to see how we can keep your website safe and secure.