Website Maintenance Costs: The ROI of Outsourcing WordPress Management

Your website is the storefront for your business. It’s the place where you make the first impression on your online customers and future partners. So keeping your website up to date and secure should be a priority. 

However, that’s not an easy task for everyone. Especially if you’re unfamiliar with how websites work and don’t have an in-house team to manage them. 

But here’s the good news; a professional WordPress maintenance service provider can take this task off your hands. And the website maintenance costs are quite reasonable as well. In fact, these services are a steal if you look at all the features you get in return.  

In this article, we’ll look at the details of website maintenance and explore how outsourcing can improve your ROI.

 

What Is Included in Website Maintenance? 

Regular website maintenance can save your business way more time and money than you might expect. Here are some of the features included in the website maintenance costs:  

1. High-speed hosting – to prevent downtime and improve SEO, security and performance. 
2. Hacker protection – to protect your sensitive data from getting into the wrong hands. 
3. WordPress core and plugin updates – to ensure optimal performance of the different features for your users.  
4. Daily backups – to save your files in case of website crashes, malware or unforeseen circumstances. 
5. Malware scans – to prevent cyberattacks. 

 

Putting Website Maintenance Costs in Perspective 

For you to understand the true value of the website maintenance services, you should get an idea of what you risk losing without proper management of your website. 

Here are a few statements that elaborate on the importance of proper and timely maintenance: 

1. The loss of data and customers in case of a website breakdown may end up costing you much more than website maintenance costs. 
2. You may lose your Google ranking and customers’ attention if your website is slow and problematic. Experts say that slow websites fall behind in conversions as well. 
3. As a business owner, you never want your customers to have a bad experience on your website due to glitches or unavailable pages. That’s why maintenance services are useful because these include management of your CMS, plugins, and optimizations that improve user experience.
4. Your portfolio grows as your business expands. Timely website maintenance can make sure that your progress accurately reflects on your website. Otherwise, it’ll look like your business did 5 years ago and who wants that? 
5. Sometimes the opportunity cost of maintaining the website yourself instead of spending that time on other business functions may be higher than the website maintenance cost.     

 

The ROI of Outsourcing WordPress Management

Investing in WordPress maintenance service can save you from spending thousands of dollars to recover your website down the line.  Business owners who have a build-it-and-forget-it mindset often end up with slow, outdated, and unsecured websites and business revenue loss. 

The key advantage of outsourcing to professionals is that you save your website from damage beyond repair. Your digital presence needs constant work and once impaired would need a lot of time and money to rebuild. 

You can avoid that by spending around $100 a month on website maintenance. Passive maintenance and unlimited update services save costs in the long run. 

Have a look at some of the ways that you can improve your ROI by outsourcing WordPress management:  

• Reduce Website Downtime 

Routine maintenance of your website means that the plugins are updated on time, the data is backed up regularly and the site is always secure. But if you fail to do this then your website might go down more frequently than it should. 

If that happens during peak traffic times then you stand to lose a big chunk of your revenue, which no one wants. For example, Amazon’s website was down for about an hour in 2018 and it cost them approximately $72 million in lost sales. 

You might not be dealing with Amazon-level revenue, but maintenance is important even for smaller businesses. 

So the website maintenance cost is a small price to pay to have 24/7 uptime monitoring and 99.9% website uptime, which is the industry standard. 

• Improve Website Performance 

Website maintenance improves your website’s performance. That’s essential to attract more traffic to your website and hence bring in more customers. 

A Google survey reported that the top frustration point for 46% of online users is waiting for slow pages to load. Also, the bounce rate increases to 32% if the load time exceeds three seconds.  Those are some scary numbers. 

Losing almost half of your visitors because of bad website performance shouldn’t be acceptable. But you can prevent that with proactive website maintenance. 

• Secure Websites Have Higher Ranking 

Websites secured with SSL certificates and https tend to rank better on search engine results. Google’s Gary Illyes said that https serves as a tiebreaker between two otherwise similar websites, with preference given to the more secure site.  

Higher rankings increase your visibility and attract more visitors to your business. Hence offering you a great return on the investment you make on maintenance services. 

• Save Your Time 

Outsourcing website maintenance saves your time. An update that takes you or your team an hour to figure out can be done in a few minutes by sending the update request to a professional. 

If you hire developers for individual updates or services then the cost can add up. Also, employing in-house website managers might not be feasible for you as a small business. That’s why outsourcing to a professional team or agency may be your best move in terms of the ROI. 

• Outperform Your Competitors 

You can easily keep things fresh for your customers and update outdated content with regular maintenance. 

It encourages visitors to come back to your site to see what’s new. That way, your business stays at the front of their minds and you make more sales. Also, search engines prefer fresh content, so it’ll also boost your ranking in search results. 

 

Website Maintenance Costs: In Summary 

When you run a business, you learn to delegate tasks to the most competent person. For example, you could take care of your books yourself but most business owners prefer to hire an accountant for that. Simply because it’s important and they need it done right. 

The same is the case with website maintenance. You could manage it on your own but that might take time away from you or your staff, time that you could be spending on more important tasks. 

That’s why WordPress maintenance services are so useful. For a relatively smaller cost of about $100/month, you could make sure that your website is always updated, backed up and secure. 

You would no longer have to spend hours recalling how to update your website or worry about the site breaking down because we’ll take care of it all. Learn more about the scope of our services and website maintenance costs here.