WordPress powers over 40% of websites that are on the internet. It’s flexible, customisable, and serviced by large amounts of helpful apps and plugins which is why so many small businesses use it. But like anything, left unchecked and unmaintained, small issues can turn into major headaches that cost you time, customers, and revenue. That’s where having a WordPress maintenance services can save your website from risks and bad actors.
By keeping your site secure, updated, and monitored, a WordPress Maintenance Service can provide preventative care to remove problems before they escalate. Busy business owners have a million things to focus on and so keeping your website safe and up to date can often fall by the wayside.
Let’s look at eight of the most common WordPress problems, what causes them and and how proper website maintenance can keep them at bay.
Slow Website Speed
A sluggish website frustrates both visitors and search engines. Google wants to provide a good user experience on any page that it suggests so having a poor page speed will negatively affect search rankings.
Common culprits that slow down a website include oversized images, unused plugins, bloated themes, or an unoptimised database.
How a website maintenance service can help: monthly or weekly speed performance audits, ongoing image optimisation, caching solutions, and database clean-ups keep your site running smoothly.
Outdated Plugins and Themes
WordPress thrives on plugins and themes – these are what make WordPress such an attractive CMS (content management system). They offer tools, apps and solutions that mean your WordPress website can do literally anything you need it to!
But when these plugins or themes aren’t updated, they become a critical weak point for your website. At minimum, it can cause compatibility issues and alter the way your website looks to users.
More worryingly, it opens up an opportunity for hackers to find a way into your website’s backend and cause havoc to your system and customer data.
How a website maintenance service can help: A managed update schedule ensures plugins and themes are kept up to date with the latest security patches. Updates are tested in safe environment before being applied to your live site-wide, reducing the risk of conflicts or downtime.
Security Vulnerabilities and Hacks
WordPress’s popularity makes it a frequent target for hackers. Weak passwords, common usernames, and poor server security all increase risk. A hacked site can mean lost data, damaged reputation, and downtime which will affect checkouts or form completions and possibly bring your business to a halt.
How a website maintenance service can help: Increased security monitoring and more secure firewalls, alongside malware scans reduce overall risk and flag any known issues. Regular patching and proactive defences keep your site safe. In the event of an attack, maintenance plans include recovery protocols to restore normal operations quickly. Not to mention, you have someone who can communicate issues more clearly with you hosting provider if required.
Broken Links and 404 Errors
As your site grows over time, links on pages or in articles may break, or the pages that they link to may be removed. When you’re running your own business, it can be difficult to find the time to regularly audit your pages and check every link is working.
But, having too many 404 errors can frustrate visitors; poor user engagement or a high bounce rate is another way your SEO performance can be hurt.
How a website maintenance service can help: Regular link checks and redirects keep users on track and search engines happy. Maintenance services also monitor for crawl errors, ensuring Google sees a well-structured site and continues to view your website as an authoritative source for users.
Outdated Content or Appearance
Keeping your content fresh and up to date is critically important, not doing so is what can lead to the 404 errors mentioned above but can also mean your online presence starts to deviate from your real life presence.
Also, overtime your website might start to age or you might want to alter the appearance of your website to match a brand refresh and avoid
How a website maintenance service can help: Scheduled maintenance hours can be used at your discretion to make any changes or improvements that you wish. If you’d like to change the colour of your navigation to an updated brand palette, no problem! If you want to add or remove some team members from your ‘Our Team’ page, leave it to your web master to do so you can be sure it’s done on time and correctly.
Downtime and Hosting Issues
Every minute of downtime is a lost opportunity and means that your business is losing hundreds or thousands of user visits per day.
This is often a results of poor hosting, overloaded servers, or unmanaged updates and these often appear without warning.
How a website maintenance service can help: Monitoring tools alert web maintenance teams to downtime the moment it happens and any good maintenance service will liaise with your hosting provider to resolve issues as quickly as possible.
Database Overload
As content builds up, your WordPress database can become cluttered. Old post revisions, spam comments, and transient data can bloat the system, slowing performance.
And once again, slow performance can mean a poor performance in search results.
How a website maintenance service can help: Regular database optimisation clears out unnecessary data, keeping your site lean and responsive and protecting your place in your search rankings.
No Backups or Recovery Plan
This is a big one!
Perhaps the biggest risk of having a website is having no reliable backups saved. A backup is essentially a downloaded version of your site’s files and code that can be reuploaded in the event that something goes irreparably wrong.
If your website, as most are, is crucially woven into your business strategy, the idea of it being here today, gone tomorrow could be devastating for your business. Therefore, having regular backups saved and ready to use is absolutely critical.
How a website maintenance service can help: By providing automated backups (daily or weekly depending on your needs and the package your choose), you ensure you’re never more than a few clicks away from recovery and being back online should the worst happen. A robust backup plan is the safety net every WordPress site should have and whether you choose to have a maintenance package or not, this is a non-negotiable in terms of business security.
How Lamplighter Digital Can Help With Your WordPress Website Maintenance
WordPress is a powerful platform, but it absolutely needs ongoing care. Many of the most common problems are preventable with regular monitoring, updates, and support. For busy business owners, outsourcing this work means peace of mind and more time to focus on business growth.
At Lamplighter Digital, we offer WordPress maintenance services in Birmingham, website maintenance services in Solihull and beyond! These packages keep your site secure, fast, and reliable and the packages are super flexible and affordable so that security isn’t reserved for larger businesses.
Don’t wait for a problem to bring your website down, get in touch to arrange a Discovery Call and find out how we can keep your WordPress site running at its best.
