How often should you perform maintenance and upgrades on your Craft CMS website?

Posted 30 Jun 2022 •

Your website represents you and your company

It helps to create a first impression and establishes trust with your potential customers. It also generates leads and sales. So, it goes without saying that your website should be up-to-date, fast and secure.

It is a challenge for organisations to keep an eye on their websites at all times and take necessary steps when needed. Many things can go wrong with a website - downtime, slow loading time, malware attacks etc. The risk of these things can be dramatically reduced by ongoing, regular maintenance and updates.

Regular maintenance & updates

Maintenance is the act of keeping your website up to date with the latest security patches, bug fixes, and software updates. If this isn't done regularly outdated software can lead to security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malware.

Some key reasons why it’s important to keep your website software up to date:

1. Security: Outdated software can be a security risk. Hackers are always finding new ways to exploit old vulnerabilities, so it’s important to keep your software up to date to patch any holes that they may find.
2. Compatibility: Outdated software can also cause compatibility issues. Newer versions of software are often designed to work with the latest versions of other software, so if you’re running an old version, you may find that things don’t work as well as they should.
3. New Features: Of course, one of the main reasons to update your software is to take advantage of new features. As software is updated, new features are often added that can make your life easier or improve your website’s functionality.
   
   Overall, it’s important to keep your website software up to date for security, compatibility, and new features.

How often should you run maintenance on Craft CMS websites?

There is no set timeframe for updating your Craft CMS software. However, it is important to keep your software up-to-date in order to maintain a secure website and to take advantage of the latest features and functionality.

In their Craft CMS developer survey (https://honcho.agency/craft-cm...) Honcho Agency asked, "How often do you run maintenance on your clients' Craft CMS sites?" and the responses were as follows:

• Once every month 49.1%
• Once every quarter 31.9%
• Once every week 9.5%
• Once every 6 months 8.6%
• Once every year 5.2%
• Never 0.9%

It's encouraging to see that almost half of the developers who responded are running maintenance once a month and the vast majority are running maintenance at least once a year.

What is our recommendation for how often you should perform maintenance and updates on your Craft CMS website?

As an absolute minimum we would always suggest that, like most cars, your website should be serviced and maintained at least once per year.

However, for greater peace of mind, we would recommend one of our 'Fixed Monthly Support Plans'.

Fixed Monthly Support Plans

Our monthly support and maintenance plans can be tailored to suit a client's budget and requirements but start from £100 + VAT per month.

The key thing is, even with the most basic plan, we monitor CMS & add-ons on a monthly basis and perform key updates as soon as they are needed. You can leave it in our capable hands and you no longer need to worry about scheduling upgrades and maintenance.

The plans vary in price depending on the complexity of the website, the Service Level Agreement (SLA) or response times that are required, and the amount of additional support & development that is needed.

If you'd like to discuss maintenance and support options we'd love to hear from you.