EAGLE SOLUTIONS
The most common emergency call I get: "Our site won't open" or "Strange ads in Romanian have appeared on our homepage". The story is almost always the same: the site was built two or three years ago, and nobody has touched it since. In this article I explain what happens to a WordPress site without maintenance, and what maintenance means in practice.
WordPress is not "finished" – it is a living system
WordPress, its plugins and its themes are updated constantly – dozens of security fixes are released every year. Attackers use automated scripts to find sites where a known vulnerability has not yet been patched. Your business is not the target – the vulnerability is. A site that has not been updated in 2 years almost certainly contains several known vulnerabilities.
What happens without maintenance?
- Hacking: spam links, redirects to dubious sites, malicious code. Google can blacklist the site, and visitors' browsers show a warning.
- Slowdowns: accumulating revisions, logs and outdated plugins slow the site down, which hurts both search rankings and conversions.
- Crashes: an old plugin simply throws an error on a new PHP version, and everyone is greeted by a blank white page.
- Data loss: without a recent backup, there is nothing to fall back on after a hosting failure or a bad update.
What does my maintenance include?
My maintenance package starts at 250 RON/month, and for that you get:
- WordPress, plugin and theme updates, tested – not just "click the update button".
- Regular backups, independent of the hosting provider, that can actually be restored.
- Uptime monitoring: if the site goes down, I find out first, not your customer.
- 2 hours of content or development changes per month: a new page, price changes, a banner, text.
- Speed optimisation: caching, image compression, database cleanup.
Monthly fee or one-off repairs?
One-off repairs are always more expensive, because they are urgent, and often mean a full cleanup of a hacked site. Monthly maintenance is like insurance: most months "nothing happens" – and that is exactly the point. On top of that, with the 2 hours of monthly changes your site does not freeze in the state it was handed over in, but keeps improving year after year.
What can you do right now?
Check when your site was last updated, whether you have a backup of it, and whether it runs on HTTPS. If you cannot answer any of these, write to me on the contact page – after a free health check I will tell you what is needed. It does not have to be a site I built.
