Why Do You Need a Web Care Plan?

When it comes to promoting your business, your website is its shop window. Your website is there to showcase your product or service’s best features and explain to potential customers why your business is their best choice. But like a shop window, appearances aren’t everything. If you don’t prioritise security and maintenance, your website can do more harm than good, putting off potential prospects and causing a host of issues if it becomes vulnerable to attacks.

You wouldn’t leave your office unlocked, so why leave your website to fend for itself? The solution to an online world of constant threats is to invest in the regular maintenance of your website. 

What can happen if I don’t maintain my website?

As technology evolves over time, your website’s software and plugins can become outdated if they’re not continually maintained. This is because updates bring a range of security patches to stay on top of potential bugs or issues that could expose vulnerabilities in your website. The last thing you want is for attackers to take down your website, and if you run an ecommerce business, time means money. Without an effective plan or security net in place for issues like these, you can experience significantly more downtime, which can cause a real problem for your business if it depends on online sales.

The risk isn’t just limited to ecommerce websites. If your website functions as a brochure for potential customers and partners, an attack can prove disastrous for your reputation. Many hackers have the knowledge and technology to completely replace your website with any kind of material they choose, potentially stealing payment information from customers or changing information on your website to something you’d rather not endorse.

How can I make my website less vulnerable?

As technology is constantly changing and updating, your website software needs to do the same to improve features and ensure it works as well as when you launched it. Your website is a crucial online hub for your business and therefore requires (and deserves) good care to make sure it continues to perform well and is safe from threat. 

To safeguard your website from attacks and aim to prevent lengthy downtime from bugs and unexpected issues, you need to invest in a regular maintenance package. A maintenance package can also be more cost-effective, helping to prevent issues and pick up snags on a regular basis rather than paying to fire-fight larger and more costly issues as they happen. 

At EDGE Creative, we offer a Web Care Plan that will help provide your website and its functionality with that all-important safety net. Our web care plan packages allow you to rest assured that we’re routinely checking your website and plugins for updates, installing them efficiently and regularly checking for issues before they happen. 

What are the benefits of a Web Care Plan? 

You can implement a Web Care Plan with us if you’re launching a brand-new website or whether you’d like to update and protect an existing one. Once your website is on the Web Care Plan, we’ll work regularly to secure it against attacks and ensure it is performing at its best. For example, we’ll keep abreast of any WordPress updates to patch any security issues that arise, or any upcoming updates of your plugins. 

Not only is it important for us to ensure that your website remains up to date, but we’ll also continually monitor traffic volume and bandwidth to prevent any downtime. Downtime can occur if the site become too heavy because software becomes out of date, or if your traffic volume is higher than your allocated disk space. This can be caused by your website growing over time, for example if you regularly upload new photos and videos to your blog page. 

A full list of what’s covered in our Web Care Plan is as follows:

• Software updates – secure against attacks (PHP / Apache / MySQL and other reliant services)
• Third-party extension updates and security checks
• Data form checks
• Ecommerce checkout performance
• Spam prevention
• Multiple web browser and device updates
• Weekly backups of database files and storage
• Real time security monitoring and malware prevention/removal
• Real time vulnerability monitoring
• SSL certificate renewal and monitoring
• Bandwidth, CPU and disk space monitoring
  

Why should I implement a Web Care Plan?

Without a Web Care Plan, your website may not be able to benefit from upcoming updates to its software or plugins. Not only does this affect the security of your website, but it also affects its functionality, as many updates can phase out support for outdated plugins and systems.

Our Web Care Plans provide our clients with peace of mind that their website is always up to date, safe and secure. Our expert team of developers will perform updates and checks on your site, and can upgrade your plugins to ensure security updates are supported continuously. Not only this, but our web care plans come with other features, such as spam prevention, SSL certificate renewal/monitoring, uptime monitoring, and ecommerce checkout performance to name a few.

Don’t wait for disaster to strike. Find out more about implementing a Web Care Plan for your business by calling 0121 355 8092 or email info@edge-creative.com.