A website CMS is a powerful tool – when well maintained.
Part of maintenance is making sure that all the bits and pieces are kept up to date. The internet, user behaviour and programming are dynamic and ever evolving. This means the code updates are normal. It may be to facilitate better programming or processing or to negate a security concern.
As example, think of something like your car. It’s probably an important part of your business and you need it to be reliable. To insure it is, you have it serviced regularly and replace worn out parts. A CMS (Content Management System) is the same. Keeping things up to date will streamline many tasks and putting it off can cause trouble.
At wildeye we help clients maintain their CMS by setting scheduled updates for them. We work with WordPress, Drupal, Magento and Joomla, to name a few, and can run these updates for you with minimal disruption.
A key part of these updates is making sure that the Plugins, Modules or Extensions you have installed still engages correctly after the update and that there are no conflicts with the updated code parts.
Consider your CMS as the core part, while each specialist function is handled by a Plugin. The author of each Plugin can only test their work against so many other Plugins and standards. Because there are so many variables at play, it is important to test your updates before updating your live site.
As part of our Maintenance Plan we back up your entire site before and after the updates. We mirror your site off on our private server and do all the updates and testing there. We ensure everything is compatible and tested OK before we action the changes on your live site. In most cases the actual downtime for your site is minimal (a few minutes) and we liaise with you to choose a suitable quiet time for the interruption.
If you have seen those pop-up reminders saying that there are pending updates for your site, talk to us straight away. We will investigate and outline a plan to keep you on track.