Why do you need to maintain your website?

Proper website maintenance is basically like insurance is for your car or home. It is important to keep your website up-to-date and backed up on a cloud (don’t rely solely on your hosting provider for this).

Here’s my top 5 reasons:

1. Guard your site against human error 🙊
Let’s face it, we’ve all made a stuff up to our site, thank goodness for backups to restore your site before your update *phew*⁠⠀
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2. Reverse update issues
Whether you’ve just installed a new update to WordPress core, theme or plugin it’s handy to have a recent backup because I’ve seen it many times before where the update isn’t compatible with your site for one reason or another. ⁠⠀
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3. Prevent losing data 💾
I cannot imagine anything worse than losing valuable content or product data I’ve spent hours inputting.
Worse yet, when you rely solely on your website host to provide backups, you will be in for bill shock if you need to ask them to restore your site $$$. Yikes!
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4. Remove malware & protect against hackers
If you do end up having your site hacked or infected with malware, you are going to want to have a clean backup ready to go so you can get your site back online faster.⁠
And they really do happen! 😬 Just last year (2020) a client came to me with an old, outdated WordPress site full of malware, it wasn’t pretty but we got it all cleaned up for them!
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5. Easy migration
With a backup tool on your site you can easily migrate your site to a new server, super easy and quickly.