WebOps and the Art of Website Maintenance
Kyle Weber — January 17, 2020 “Uh oh…”
I ease my foot off the gas and look down-road for an exit. I’m not sure what’s going on but my car made a noise, there’s a light on the dash, and I don’t want to die today. I pull off the highway and come to a stop before fishing the manual from the glove box. I flip through until I find the symbol on the dash. It’s my oil.
I shouldn’t be surprised — I never check my oil. In fact, in the couple of years I’ve had my car, I’ve never even changed it. The same goes for tire pressure, wiper fluid — you name it. With this in mind, I hop out of the car, pry off the plates, and call an Uber.
Time to buy a new car!
Okay, maybe I made that up to illustrate a point. A new car every couple of years would be outrageous, especially when I won’t take care of it. A car is expensive, it plays a major role in our day-to-day and future plans. That’s why we invest in oil changes, winter undercoats, and those cabin air filters that seem like a scam — to extend the life of our vehicles.
With the price of a new website and the level of importance it carries within your business, why would you treat it any differently? The average company gets a new site every two and a half years! Why? Are businesses really changing that much? That quickly? Or are they turning a blind eye to the ongoing maintenance required to keep their site humming? Maybe they don’t have the right resources or systems in place to do so.
That’s where WebOps comes in — a multidisciplinary team with fluency in marketing, sales, design, and development, that can maintain your website so it lasts longer and doesn’t lose its value the second you drive it off the lot.
There’s a lot that can go wrong
Apart from your website’s content and design, there’s CRM plugins, SSL certificates, DNS connections, and other acronyms to monitor. If these things are left unchecked and unmaintained, your site and your business are at risk of seriously breaking down. This isn’t a scenario where ignorance is bliss, yet all too often it takes a full-scale crash for businesses to act. Unfortunately for them, that usually means blowing the budget on a brand new site and the cycle repeats.
With a WebOps team dedicated to maintaining your site, you can avoid the crash, avoid the redesign, save the money, and go through your day knowing the CRM plugins, SSL certificates, and other acronyms are taken care of.
It’s all fun until someone gets sued
If you haven’t heard of GDPR, you need WebOps more than I thought.
From CASL to GDPR to the new CCPA, the digital space is constantly under fire from legislation dealing with user privacy, data, and consent. In our experience, we’ve seen companies respond to legislation by dumping it on legal or IT. Legal makes sense because failure to comply can get you sued. IT makes sense because taking action means dev work. But what does legal know about _ga cookies? What does IT know about the various marketing tactics tied to site tracking?
Again, it comes back to utilizing a multidisciplinary WebOps team who can speak to the gamut of domains these legislations touch on. WebOps can make sense of the Privacy Policy, they can create the consent banner, and they can organize the cookies. “What did the lawyer say to tech support?” sounds like the start of a joke, not the workflow that protects your business from litigation.
These legislations won’t just go away, either. If anything, they’re becoming more and more frequent. Employ a team to act on them or risk joining the list of companies hit by lawsuits, or worse, present your business as one that can’t be trusted by consumers.
WordPress does what it wants
WordPress is the most used CMS out there. With companies and brands like Bloomberg, Sony, TechCrunch, and even Beyoncé choosing to power their websites with WordPress, there’s a good chance you’re doing the same. If that’s the case, the name Gutenberg might ring a bell and send shivers down your spine.
Gutenberg is the name of WordPress 5.0’s content editor — a shift in the direction of drag-and-drop interfaces used by Squarespace and Wix. Released in late 2018, users hopped online to find their custom page templates were broken, content was lost, and pages were impossible to build. Not a great way to start your day.
While it was a disaster for many, it was a minor annoyance to us, as we’ve considered ourselves a WebOps team for some time. When we experienced the fallout from WordPress 5.0, we simply hopped on Pantheon, restored a version of our site from before the 5.0 update, and everything was fixed. From there, we downloaded a plugin that enabled the legacy content editor, updated to WordPress 5.0, confirmed the problem was solved and went on with our day. An issue that spawned thousands of 1-star reviews, angry tweets, and articles, was no more than an hour of work for us.
Gutenberg wasn’t WordPress’s mistake, it was yours. If it derailed your site and took you away from other work, that’s on you for not being set up to take action.
You don’t need a new website. You need WebOps.
Sure, a website redesign is flashy, but it won’t solve the inherent problem with so many businesses — a lack of resources dedicated to website maintenance. Without it, you’ll remain stuck in the two-and-a-half-year redesign cycle, investing time and money on a bandaid solution. While your website might look fine on the surface, you need to pop the hood and take a look inside to really see what’s going on. If you’re like me with cars, you won’t even know what you’re looking for.
That’s why I take my Chrysler to the mechanic and why your website needs to be supported with WebOps.
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