We’ve seen time and time again companies not prioritizing their website, treating their online presence like “something we have to do because everyone does it”, and nothing more. In our opinion that’s a mistake, one that might not have a clear visible cost, but make no mistake, the cost is there.
People spend more time online than ever, and your company should leverage this fact with a strong website presence. Good online presence always starts with a website. If you’re doing paid ads that’s actually a requirement if you don’t want to waste your click budget.
Why not a social media profile, or a YouTube channel, you ask?
Because you have (almost) full control on your website domain name and content while an account on a platform you don’t control can always be cancelled, deleted, blocked, hacked, and must obey always changing rules.
We’ve discussed why most businesses can start with a simple WordPress website, something that is achievable with a small budget, and we’ve touched on why you should budget not just for maintenance, but also for future developments and ongoing website costs.
In case you’re still not concerned with periodic website maintenance, despite our efforts to explain how neglecting web maintenance could hurt your business we’ll try something different in this article: discuss a recent situation we had with one of our clients, who shall remain nameless for obvious reasons.
Why are we writing this article? Because we believe this is one of those little things that if not addressed can and will become another barrier in the path of growing your small business.
You can revisit our website maintenance article to read about the obvious, easy to see impact of a website that doesn’t work quite well, so we won’t be covering the topic in this article. But we are going to mention the downsides briefly:
- Website can be hacked easily
- Slow website and poor user experience decreases conversion rates
- Organic search rankings are affected by poor technical SEO
- Compliance fails, so your business risks serious fines
- Website downtime can occur, affecting sales and company reputation
We’ll jump right into what happened and why it happened.
The project
This is one of our oldest clients. We’ve started working together on a few website pages which were designed and implemented using Elementor Pro, one of the best block editors out there. In time we’ve taken on more varied and complex tasks.
Our first impression when we took over the website was that the previous team liked to install plugins whenever the client asked for new functionality. No custom code, which can significantly reduce the number of plugins used. And speaking of plugins, at some point there were over 50 installed and active!. That’s a lot to take for a simple WordPress website running in a shared hosting environment.
Not only that, but the website also used a custom theme which added its own extra functionality. In time the list of plugins grew by various marketing related items installed directly by the client.
All this contributed in a few years to a slow moving website, despite several improvements in areas such as lazy loading, image optimization, CDN resource loading and page caching.
Maintenance was not prioritized due to strict budgetary constraints. We only did mass plugin updates on a staging version of the website once in a while. Periodicity was dictated by small problems that couldn’t be solved easily.
It was easy to see that these situations could be prevented by doing regular website maintenance and cleanup. But there was no budget available.
What happened
The clients emailed us one day that editing pages with Elementor was no longer possible. The editor was stuck in the loading state and no matter what he tried it would not load correctly.
We’ve investigated the situation and provided a temporary fix, which was to switch to Site settings, then back to Edit page. That seemed to work every time, but it was not an elegant fix.
We proposed a deeper investigation, updating everything, doing preventive maintenance, but since the editor still worked, that was delayed for a later date.
That was a couple of months ago.
Then this “fix” stopped working, and that made it impossible to edit or add new pages. This is when the client expressed his frustration with the situation, which blocked creative flows at the worst possible moment.
Solution and outcome
At this point we saw the opportunity to fix some of the long term issues of the website. We’ve presented our case and made a list of all the plugins, describing what everything does, asking for input on what was needed and what could be disabled/deleted.
We’ve managed to get down to only 19 active plugins, and that made the website perform much faster. It was noticeable, not just measurable. The client was impressed by the new performance level.
Unfortunately, the Elementor editor was still stuck at loading. This is when we’ve proposed a somewhat radical fix: get rid of the three year old theme and install the Hello Elementor barebones theme.
We’ve performed the switch on the staging website at first, taking note of the functionality that would be removed. We found a way to port some of the now missing functionalities, while redirecting some old pages that the client deemed obsolete.
And voila!
All problems disappeared and the website moved even faster. Not only that, but now the website theme is one less thing to worry about. That is because Hello Elementor is free and doesn’t really do anything else than providing a clean slate for the Elementor plugin used to manage all page templates and content.
This story goes to show that websites without maintenance and without a strict plugin installation policy can slowly become bloated and will lead to all kinds of problems.
This situation can be avoided with a little bit of planning, periodic maintenance and cleaning. Logging changes are also recommended, helping not just with direct client reporting, but also with remembering the why behind choices we made a long time ago.
And the good news is that all this doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. If you draw the line it’s probably just as expensive as fixing everything on the spot, minus the headache, giving you peace of mind so you can take care of your business.
Don’t wait any longer. Get in touch with us and we’ll set up a personalized maintenance plan for your company website.
