Required WordPress Maintenance

Over the last three months, I’ve encountered four WordPress sites that were hacked or completely unresponsive that required immediate attention. In each of the four instances, the reason was the same: Failure to update WordPress, Themes and Plugins.

That is right — in each of the four instances, simply updating the code-base, plugins and themes would have prevented the sites from being compromised.

Additionally, each of the four websites that were impacted failed to have a regular backup procedure. Luckily, the sites ere reparable. If these sites had not been repairable, years of blogging and content development would have instantly vanished.

Development vs Maintenance

Website development is costly, both in terms of time and money. Most web development contracts are considered complete at launch; so once the site is live, ongoing updates are generally not included. In this case, if your site is hijacked several months after launch, you will likely be billed to resolve the issue.

Obviously, this is a source of frustration for the client and the development house. Clients think the developers created a faulty product, while the developers feel they delivered a product that wasn’t properly maintained.

An Ounce of Prevention

Not all security breaches are preventable, nor will all servers function properly 100% of the time. That said, hackers are known to exploit known vulnerabilities, thus routine maintenance is often all that is necessary to protect yourself.

Create a schedule to update your WordPress core files, plugins, themes and databases.  In the event of catastrophic meltdown, you will have all the ingredients to recover your site.

Jim Carlson dot Net offers WordPress maintenance and backup services for those who prefer to manage their business, not their website. Call (715) 301-0098 for a consultation.