What are the true costs of WordPress Maintenance?
WordPress is absolutely free, and for a very minimal cost you can easily get a website live for your business. With a unique domain name, some decent hosting the costs comes in at approx. R2000. Not bad to have something live very quickly.
If you purchased a theme and hired a development company to install it. The costs would start at about R10, 000 and depending on complexity could be a lot higher. Is that R2000 sounding even better?
No development company can develop a system that is future proof, as market’s and security requirements change, software also changes. So over time your initial install of WordPress will become vulnerable.
WordPress is constantly being improved. It is a system that can change quite often during a year. There were 26 core WordPress upgrades in the last year alone, this excludes any custom themes and plugins that are being used. Some of the more popular plugins are updated monthly, and sometimes even weekly.
So what options do you have?
Well you could do nothing and hope nothing happens. Then if something does happen higher an expert to fix the website at R450 an hour. Leaving a bad taste in your mouth? Read further….
- What would you do if it took 20 hours to fix?
- What are the true costs of your clients receiving spam from your website?
- Or if your website was hosting illegal or disturbing content.
Well that paints a pretty picture of doom and gloom with a hefty price tag attached too.
Your next option is to take an active role in the maintenance of your WordPress website, and taking the time to educate yourself on its management and upkeep. Sounds all good but what are the true costs of spending 4-8 hours a month managing your backups and maintenance, not to mention the 100 hours of training to get yourself up to speed on maintenance?
Also as it is not your true profession what happens when something go’s completely wrong and once again you have to bring in an expensive professional?
Is that the sound of your bank account emptying?
So what’s next?
You bring in a company like WPZA to maintain your site. We manage the updates and upgrades, manage any issues and implementing fixes as needed. Backup the site. Improve its performance and manage about 40 other processes keeping your site running and running well.
We maintain many WordPress websites and we can bring the knowledge we have learned from one site and apply it to all our sites greatly improving our speed and reliability.
Have a look at our maintenance plans and please drop us a mail so we can help you better.
Tags: Maintenance Costs, WordPress Maintenance
