Do You Need a Webmaster?

by | Aug 10, 2021 | Webmaster Services

Webmaster Services

Are you hoping to save money on your website by assigning someone in your company to make necessary updates? I have been doing web development and website maintenance for over 20 years now. I’ve dealt with a lot of different companies, many types of employees and various personalities through the years. I’ve helped many companies improve their online presence through Search Engine Optimization, improving the theme, coding and speed of many sites. The most common theme I hear from small and medium sized businesses is that they want to save money by having someone within the company update their site for them. I hear this: “My HR person used to have a website, so they are now in charge of updating our company’s site”.

This is so common. People think that ‘updating the content in the site’ is all that they need to do. There are so many things that are involved in running a website that have nothing to do with updating it. Just to name a few:

There’s More to Just Updating: There’s Website Maintenance

  • Security – Do you know what version of PHP that runs your WordPress site? Do you know when the EOL (End of Life) was on it? Running your site on anything older than PHP 7.3 not only degrades performance, but leaves your site open to hacks. There are many other things involved with securing your site as well, such as: making sure your WordPress site has a security plugin, making sure the server operating system is updated, making sure WordPress and the plugins not only stay updated, but CAN you update them? Are they compatible?
  • Performance – Does the server that your site runs on optimally configured to run your site? IE: Caching, patches and security updates. Are you running your DNS through a service that offers a CDN, such as CloudFlare? Do you know how to minify CSS and JS files so that it reduces the size of files sent to the site, thus speeding up your site? Did you know that speed affects your SEO? Do you know how to test the speed of your website?
  • Updating the CMS– Do you know how to update your website as far as the core files that drives it? Can you update WordPress? (Or Magento or X-Cart or Drupal, etc)? You might say, “Why yes, I do! You just click the ‘Update’ button!”. In many cases, you can. For example, if you’re updating to a minor version (IE: WordPress 5.7.1 to 5.7.2). But, when you’re updating to a major version, your site may break (IE: WordPress 5.7.2 to 5.8). You have to make sure that your theme and all the plugins are compatible with the new major version before you update. We study all of this information, check your theme, plugins, server environment before we update.
  • Efficiency – We can do the updating of content faster and more efficiently than your staff can. This also frees up your employee’s time to let them concentrate on tasks that is more suited for them. You wouldn’t hire us to do HR, would you? So, let your HR people do HR and let us do the website work.

These are just a few examples of what goes on behind the scenes in maintaining a website. It’s not just updating the content. It’s making sure the site stays secure and running optimally.

Webbs offers Website Maintenance Services as well as Webmaster Services to help your company not only succeed, but excel.