Summary
Quarterly maintenance is crucial to the longevity of your website, preventing viruses, maintaining long lasting backups, and avoiding outages that would otherwise prevent your clients from reaching you.
Why is website maintenance important?
When your website goes live for the first time, it is brand-new, and all the software and tools are the latest and greatest. But as time goes by, the “latest and greatest” become the “outdated and vulnerable“. The best way to mitigate any potential issues is to perform regular maintenance on all of the software being used to keep your website up and running. At Orillia ProNet Inc. we follow a consistent, quarterly procedure to ensure your website is as secure and up-to-date as possible.
How Your Website is Protected with Backups.
By backing up your website automatically three times a week, we ensure there is always a fallback option in the event something unexpected occurs. We also perform a quarterly backup that lasts until the next maintenance occurs, ensuring that even if a fault goes undetected for a long period of time, there is a proven copy that can be restored.
Protection from Viruses.
While our hosting services automatically scan your website on a nightly basis, we additionally perform a manual virus/malware scan before we backup your account. This way there are no malicious files stored in any manual backups, allowing for long term, secure storage, free from potential infections.
Software Updates & Why They are Needed.
Despite appearing as a one solid cohesive website, your site is comprised of a variety of different software bundles, working together to provide a consistent experience. Often times, the default behaviour of this software is to update itself automatically, but this can lead to unexpected complications. Rather than allowing automatic updates, the best practice is to ensure all content is backed up securely, before manually updating all necessary software, preventing any failures during the update process from causing a long-lasting outage.
Testing for Potential Errors.
Once all the software has been updated, virus scans performed, and all content is securely backed up, it is important to double-check the front-end display of the website. Because multiple different packages of software are working together, there is always a possibility of conflicts, even if everything appears fully functional at first glance. By going through and previewing the website we can confirm that your pages are functioning properly and not presenting your users with error messages. As the primary purpose of your website is to draw in clients, the functionality of the contact form is crucial, and needs to be tested regularly to confirm your clients can reach you. To that end, we send a quarterly test email through your contact form to ensure that it is being received correctly.
By performing consistent quarterly maintenance, we ensure that your website always has a backup in case of the unexpected, that no virus or malware is able to get a strong foothold in your account, and that your website continues to serve you and your customers to the best of it’s abilities.
You can read more about our web services here.