If you are one of our website clients, you may assume that once your website is up and running, our involvement ends. It doesn’t. There are things we do to help maintain your website on a daily basis.
Ongoing maintenance
Your website, like most similar ones these days, runs on WordPress, the most popular Content Management System or CMS. We further extend WordPress’s functionality through the use of plugins. A typical website will use over a dozen such plugins. These will include:
- A security plugin to protect against hackers.
- An optimization plugin to speed page loading.
- A page builder plugin to add features not found in WordPress.
- A plugin that regularly backs your website up to a remote server.
Both WordPress and these plugins are updated on a regular basis. This not only adds new features but also prevents software conflicts and improves website security.
We check daily to ensure that all of our client websites have the most up-to-date versions of WordPress and any installed plugins. When updates are needed, we make them.
We also use WordPress’s Site Health function to ensure all of our clients’ websites maintain a perfect score. As a result, we have yet to have a website fall victim to hackers or a major software conflict. Because all of this takes place behind the scenes, you most likely were unaware it was happening.
You might think this is common sense and basic good business, but you would be surprised at the number of websites we come across with woefully out-of-date software. In our minds, there is no excuse for this.
Checking the mail
You’ve most likely seen websites in which the company’s email address appears as a clickable link. The company then wonders why they get so much spam. It’s because hackers send robotic spiders across the web to mine the email addresses of companies foolish enough to make their email address public.
To help prevent this, our clients’ websites generally include an email contact form. These are further protected by Google’s reCAPTCHA which prevents these email forms from being filled out by robotic ‘bots. As a result, the only way spammers can use your email form to send you unwanted messages is to pay a live human being to fill out your contact form by hand.
This form-mail spam happens, but nowhere near as often as conventional email spam. We address what you can do about some of the worst offenders in a separate article.
If you look at the email that comes to you via your website, you will see that a copy goes to you and another copy goes to us. Is this because we are unnecessarily nosey? Hardly. We do this for two reasons.
- Should a spammer one day come up with a way to massively or maliciously attack everyone’s email contact forms any more than currently happens, we want to know about it immediately. This will allow us to deal with it.
- If customers use your email contact form to ask the same questions repeatedly, it tells us that there is a problem with your website that requires fixing.
One of our dive store clients has an entire section of their website devoted to everything a person would need to know about learning to dive. The first thing you see when you go to their website is a large, clickable button that goes directly to this section.
Yet, despite this, you would be amazed at the number of people who bypass this, go directly to the email contact form and ask the store to “send them information on learning to dive.” Because if the store’s primary business was teaching people to dive, the last place they would put this information is on their website…right?
Okay, lazy and stupid are two character flaws you can’t fix. Past this, however, are the questions reasonable people ask that point out:
- There is important information that needs to be on the website but isn’t.
- The information is there but needs to be clearer.
By monitoring the email that comes through the website, we can identify these problems and fix them.
Constantly at work for you
So, as you have seen, once your website is up and running our job doesn’t end.
- We check daily to make sure your website’s software is up to date and working as it should.
- We are constantly on the lookout for customer feedback that may help your website work better.
Obviously, if you have questions or concerns about your website, you need only ask.