Why Your New WordPress Website is Already Obsolete

How to Extend Your Website Investment

It took months to hammer out the details for your new website. The agency that built it for you kept adding new ideas and new things. The costs went up. Your 15-year-old kid built a website once. It wasn’t this complicated. And then they had the audacity to ask for a monthly maintenance fee. “Enough is enough, no WordPress maintenance plan.”

I don’t know how many times I have seen this over the past ten years as a developer. I have built well over 200 websites for companies and agencies. Most of the time, I work as a white label developer for medium-sized under-staffed agencies and small agency owners. Most of the time, the small agency owner hasn’t developed the skillset to build websites but they can sell their clients. They don’t know that code is being updated constantly. The small agency owners don’t know that tech is constantly changing. They aren’t willing to learn and it costs their clients money. And worse, most single-person agency owners have stopped learning about their trade…or never knew anything in the first place. They read The 4-Hour Work Week, took Tim Ferriss’ advice, and were off to the beaches sipping pina coladas while the developer they hired is sweating out the projects.

Within six months, their client’s website is throwing errors. Or the new owners bring in an intern to maintain their website. They think website maintenance should be free and they pursue that. The new website owners get what they pay for.

The exact reason your site is starting to break is beyond me (unless you are one of the people who hasn’t been listening to me lately). There could be many reasons and there may be none of these reasons. However, here are just a few reasons why your new WordPress website may already be obsolete:

1. You Don’t Have a WordPress Maintenance Plan for Your Website

“What do you mean I need a maintenance plan? Insert agency owner name here told me my website would last for years!”

Here is a news flash for you. Your website isn’t going to last for years. If you’re lucky, it will last one year before things start breaking without maintaining your website.

WordPress and PHP (the underlying language) are changing and changing quickly. Since WordPress’ first build in 2003, PHP has proved to be a robust language with lots of advantages. Since then, a lot of things have changed. Light bulbs that used to cost $.59 now cost $10. Some cars are now fully electric-powered. Television is not as near as powerful of a medium as it was just a few years ago. Computers process faster, the internet runs faster, and websites are expected to be faster than ever. WordPress has to change or it will lose its spot as the number one CMS in the world. In five years, WordPress may not even use PHP anymore. And your website won’t work anymore either.

2. You Don’t Know How to Update Your Themes or Plugins

It’s probably not even your fault. Your agency built your site for a few thousand dollars (or possibly even a developer for a few hundred dollars) and turned it over to you, and said they would call back after a while. The problem is that they never really turned it over to you.

An ideal situation is that your agency (or developer) would hang around and show you how things worked. However, you probably didn’t pay for that extra level of support. And you got what you paid for.

However, it doesn’t take a lot of time to Google “How to Update My WordPress Theme” and watch a short YouTube video.

In fact, with the direction WordPress is going, themes and plugins may give way to blocks in the very near future. And the possibility that your WordPress website won’t work anymore improves.

3. You Don’t Invest in Your Marketing Success

“Websites should be as cheap as possible,” you thought as you reminisce the days of GeoCities. And now you have a website. Your budget called for you to cut corners on the design, the production, and the content. Now you have exactly what you paid for, an awful website that isn’t going to bring you any business. It’s clearly the website’s fault, the agency’s (or developer’s) fault, or anyone else’s fault…except your (the website owner’s) fault.

Therefore, you do not have a web maintenance plan. See a pattern yet?

Marketing is an area where you truly get what you pay for.

4. You Think Your Website Will Last Forever

Your website isn’t like a vintage car. It will not improve with age. It will only decline with age. If you want to know what direction WordPress is going, check out their Make WordPress blog. To keep your WordPress website shiny and new, you have to maintain it.

Your website isn’t even a thing. It is a bunch of code that is translated into something your eyes can see by a browser. If the underlying code changes, your website will eventually break. You need a maintenance plan for your webiste.

Conclusion

In today’s world, your website is your first impression for your company. If you don’t take care of your website, perspective customers will assume you won’t take care of them either.

If you are interested in lasting success, take care of your website. Have your developer take regular checks to make sure your website is operating at top capacity. Get a WordPress maintenance plan too. There are many low-cost options to help you keep your website up and running and not be a target for hackers.