As technology evolves, website software is constantly being updated to make it more secure, faster and more visible to search engines – often, even easier to use. Just like you periodically update your smartphone software, you should do the same with your website. This way, you ensure that your school website is always live, ready for parents and stakeholders.
Websites are no longer “set and forget”.
We all service our car to make sure it works as expected. The same should happen with our website – if we don’t periodically that check that everything is in order we could have issues, from visitors leaving the site if they find things wrong with it, to your desk staff wasting valuable time by responding to phone calls about wrong or missing information on the site.
The Benefits of a Care plan.
Having someone taking care of your website is crucial to your school management. Let a professional make sure that all the necessary updates are done in a timely and error-free manner, any issue is caught on time, and in case of a major issue there’s always a plan B ready to roll.
Maintenance Workflow.
At Next Learning we take periodic backups of the website and we check the website after our updates for any issues. We keep track of all the updated plugins, so if there is ever an issue we see what plugin version was changed and revert back. Furthermore, we also include in our monthly maintenance report the performance and security scans.
DIY Maintenance: why it’s not a good idea.
You may think that WordPress updates are quite simple to run. While often this is the case, you may have instances of the site not working properly anymore after some updates – would you know which plugin update caused the issue? Even worse, what if the whole website goes down after an update? Maintaining your site yourself could cost you more than you may think.
It Costs More to Fix Than to Maintain.
Your job is not to maintain a website – you have a school to run. No one expects you to have the experience and the knowledge involved in managing a successful website. If something happens to your site, you can either try and fix it yourself (causing more damage, or simply taking time away from your core business) or pay someone to fix it, which it could be quite pricey or it may take more time than you expect. Just like your car, it costs more to fix it than it does to maintain it properly. The same applies to your website: a care plan is the equivalent of the regular oil change that will keep your engine running smoothly for years.
Call in a professional!
Let us deal with what we know best. There’s no reason why you should try to maintain your own website if you’re not a web professional. By securing an experienced web professional to update and maintain your website properly, you are actually making a long term investment in functionality, reputation, and work hours.
If you are interested in one of our care plans for your website, please get in touch with us to learn how we can keep your site in perfect working order.
