If you built a house, you’d maintain it so it would last and remain in good condition over the years. Same with a car; oil changes, tune-ups and other fixes are par for the course once you drive those new wheels off the lot. The same rule applies to launch of a custom website.
If you want to get the most value out of your investment over time, you must stay on top of the health of your site to avoid major fixes that would far outweigh the cost of regular upkeep over time.
Custom website design and development is amazing and a clear need for many clients. With our custom WordPress sites, the sky’s the limit for our clients; robust functionality, ground-breaking visual elements, special integrations in the back-end… the list goes on.
However, to achieve custom site look and functionality, many pieces are put into place behind the scenes, and those items don’t exist in a vacuum post-launch; they continue to live once the site goes live. The WordPress core itself is updated periodically to improve the platform, and the plugins that run the site’s functionality also have updates released to help with performance and security.
Because these updates improve the systems running on the site and close loopholes in the technology, by keeping WordPress core and plugins updated, you are investing in the long-term health and security of your website.
But it’s not as simple as pushing the “update” button in the WordPress back end! Updates can bring all kinds of changes with them, and updating WordPress’ core to the latest version can clash with the existing functionality that a plugin brings to the site, or vice versa. Because of this, you need an experienced WordPress developer to back up the site files on the server, make updates, and then carefully comb the site to test and troubleshoot any issues that come up.
The best case scenario is to have the team that created your unique custom WordPress site handle ongoing maintenance, as they know the site inside and out and can best understand what might be causing issues triggered by an update.
This is why we recommend a custom WordPress website client set aside an ongoing annual budget of roughly 20 percent of the project cost to be allocated for maintenance. The benefit is a website that will last longer, work the way you want it to over time as iterations can be made more easily, and the knowledge that your site will be much more secure than an unmaintained site.
Our retainer packages can be tailored to your specific goals and needs, and ensures you’ll have proactive support and maintenance rather than the much more costly scenario of fixing something after it has broken and much time has gone by since launch and/or the last time the site was maintained and updated. A retainer is doubly valuable to our clients as it allows us to seamlessly jump in to fix an issue as a priority on our schedule, and results in being highly cost- and time-effective as it eliminates the time it would take us to assess and quote and place on our schedule if we are handling a la carte.
If you’re interested in discussing a WordPress website maintenance retainer further, please fill out the quick form below and we’ll take it from here!
