10 May Why Website Maintenance is Important?

Posted at 12:56h in Website Design by

Hi, everyone. My question today is, are you maintaining your website? If not you really need to watch this video. The reason why website maintenance is very important is that, when hackers try to hack into your website, its easier for them to go into a website that is not updated and maintained. So, let’s talk about the first thing or the first area of maintenance.

 

Updating your Website

So, the first area of maintenance is updating the plugins and the core WordPress platform. Occasionally, you will get updates from WordPress which are pretty much security updates. In most cases, it features, but security is the main thing. So, if you don’t update your website, it means that the hackers are able to get into your website and install the software.

On the other hand, you also get updates from the plugin developers of the plugins that you’re using. We have a WordPress 4.4.1 update available, and then here, you can see we have all these updates that are needed for the plugins. So, these are the updates I’m talking about.

 

WordPress

Sometimes these updates may break the system because it’s not compatible with the current WordPress version. So, here, for example, you can see that this WooCommerce plugin, it says here, & Compatibility with WordPress 4.4.1: 100% So, this is very good. As I mentioned before, updating your WordPress core system and upgrading your plugins is very, very important because this is an open door for hackers to come into your website.

 

Now, let me give you an example of one of the clients that we used to work with, who decided not to update her website, and here it is. So, when you go to this URL, straightaway you can see, it says the site contains malware. The other thing is, sometimes these hack attacks are so sophisticated that you don’t even see it.

The website could be running okay, but when someone accesses your website through a mobile device, it then redirects to the hacker’s website for a page where they are selling their own products.

 

Strong Password

 

Now, let’s talk about the second thing, which is brute force attacks. When you have a weak password on your computer, it is very easy for hackers to come into your website by guessing your password. So, here, we can see, we have an attempted failed login using username admin. Now, this is true evidence that your website is being targeted on a daily basis, sometimes even an hourly basis.

Let’s move on to the last thing, which is troubleshooting. Now, sometimes when you update your website, you update the theme, your update WordPress, things do break, as I mentioned earlier on. You could fall into a problem where, when things break, you’re not sure where to go and fix your problem. So, you need to have the ability to back up your website to make sure that when these things happen you can always go back to your backup and make sure your website is back up and running.

Now, why is it important for small businesses to make sure that they have this maintenance in place? Well, number one, obviously, if you’re running a business, you want to make sure that you are up there on the internet 24/7, so when people visit your website, it’s always up and running, it always gives a good impression that you’re always online.

Secondly, when people come to your website and they see that your website is down, or it’s got malware installed on it, or it’s redirecting you to unwanted websites, this can cause your visitors to your website to distrust, you know, what you’re doing. So, maintenance is very, very important.

 

Now, the question is, why would anyone want to hack your website? Of course, you know, you’ve just built your website, you’re a small business, why are you the target? As I mentioned before, these targets are done automatically, okay? It’s unlikely that these hackers have seen your website and they’re coming directly at you because of your business or who you are, although sometimes it does happen.

But these are ways these hackers can redirect traffic to their own website and sell their products using your information on your website. Secondly, they could want…they would want to come, maybe, into your website to grab your database, especially if you’re running an e-commerce website, to see if they can get information from your web…