Ongoing Maintenance Strategy
Beyond the scope of hosting, your WordPress website will need to be regularly updated and maintained. Updates are absolutely essential to maintaining the design, functionality, and security of your website. These updates can be processed automatically or manually by your team or by a website developer.
Automatic Updates
Pros
Cheaper for ongoing maintenance (less time spent by your team or a developer doing manual updates). Helps keep your site secure if you don't log in often and are likely to forget to manually run updates.
Cons
Riskier (susceptible to spontaneously breaking the site without you knowing). Your website is among the first to 'experiment' with a brand new update and it could crash or experience major glitches until a new update is available. Manual maintenance is more time-consuming and potentially more expensive.
The WordPress environment will need to be updated periodically. These are less frequent than plugin updates and are usually less significant (less likely to break the site). However, when WordPress needs a major update it can conflict with plugins that have not yet been tested with the newest WordPress version.
Plugin updates can both solve and cause glitches, so updates need to be managed carefully or your site can break. Updating a plugin is very simple, but knowing when and how to update to avoid issues is something that requires some specialization.
Some plugins are specifically designed to help with backend tasks, such as security and performance. Performance plugins help your website run quickly and efficiently. Your website can be optimized and secured a great deal using free plugins, but advanced features often cost money.
Most of the plugins powering your website are free and can be updated automatically. For most websites, there are typically 2-5+ premium plugins that need licenses in order to be updated automatically. You can purchase your own licenses at full price or sign up to use our ArcFires licenses at a discount.
As we get ready to launch your website, we will let you know which premium plugins your website will need to maintain. We strongly recommend that you read more about plugin licenses here.
The website theme needs to stay updated to stay secure.
If you had our ArcFires team build your website then we most likely used the Hello Elementor theme. This is a very minimal theme that needs very infrequent updates. Updates to this theme are usually insignificant and have a low risk of breaking the site. Other themes are usually more risky to update.
The database stores all of the information for your website, such as the website content, settings, colors, products, etc. The information in your database is what makes your website different from another WordPress website with the same theme and plugins, etc.
Plugins often require updates to the database to improve the way newer versions of the plugin interact with the database.
WordPress websites are powered by a programming language called PHP. The language receives security and performance updates from time to time. This generally doesn’t need to updated more than once every year or two.
