In February 2015, CodeGuard, which offers automated cloud backups, undertook a survey of 503 WordPress users – and the results may surprise you.
Website Backups – or Lack of Them
In the first instance, 22% of respondents believe that website back-up is unimportant! And this is supported by the fact that 47% back up only every few months, and 22% users stated they did it occasionally – whatever that might mean.
Can this be right? We can only conclude that these lucky folk have never had to run a code comparison between a live site and backup to find a hacked file, or suffered database corruption and lost everything.
Training – or Lack of It
Perhaps these sanguine individuals should be forgiven – may be this serious oversight is due to a lack of experience and training in WordPress – only 23% of users had received extensive training. But even without training, surely firsthand experience would make these optimistic souls be a little more savvy about looking after their website – 63% confessed to having deleted files which weren’t backed up.
Plugin Update Failures
This fascinating survey also asked about problems experienced with plugin updates – 69% confirmed they had a plugin fail after an update, and an unfortunate 24% had multiple plugin failures. Worse still, 21% of respondents have been face to face with the truly frightening WordPress “white screen of death”.
The Cost of Putting Things Right
You may find these results surprising, or you may find yourself nodding sagely having experienced some or all of these problems yourself in the past. But with such a high proportion of WordPress users experiencing technical issues, why aren’t people taking a more proactive approach to safeguarding their website?
The users surveyed clearly value their website and appreciate it lies at the heart of their business (and often the most important revenue-maker) – if things go wrong, a whopping 24% said they would pay anything to get their site restored.
A Pre-Emptive Strike
Whilst you may be happy to spend anything to get your crashed website back up and running, prevention is always better than cure. If you’re not an expert WordPress user but the fate of your company’s website lies in your hands, you have two options:
1) get yourself trained up to expert level in WordPress as quickly as possible, learn how to do plugin updates correctly, backup regularly and never make a human error that you can’t fix otherwise you may have to use an emergency WordPress support service.
or
2) sign up for a regular WordPress maintenance plan where experts will maintain your website, back it up, monitor it for malware, carry out core system, plugin and theme updates without fuss, and be on hand to help you with any problems you encounter.
The choice is of course yours. :-)
If you’d like to find out more about our regular WordPress maintenance plans just click here.
