Your website is a key component of your marketing strategy. It can operate as a lead generation tool, a credibility check, or both. Either way, your website is not a “launch and forget it” proposition.

Even if your marketing strategy does not include content marketing and regular website content updates you still need to budget for making sure your website is functioning at optimal capacity from a technical perspective. Just like your car requires regular, ongoing maintenance to function properly, your website also needs to be maintained.

Further, your website is often the first impression people get of your law firm. How your site looks and performs sends a message to potential clients about your attention to detail, trustworthiness and reliability. All attributes that people look for when hiring a lawyer.

If you’ve got a site that is slow to load, doesn’t display content properly, contains broken links or doesn’t function as expected (think forms that don’t work) that reflects poorly on your firm. Further, if your website is running on an out-of-date theme or infrastructure you are leaving yourself open to security breaches. A hacked site is not a good look and obviously has implications for your cyber security insurance.

Why regular maintenance matters: 

1. Security – Regular maintenance keeps your website secure by updating software, plugins and themes. This will help patch vulnerabilities and protect against potential cyber-attacks. 
2. Performance – Maintenance improves website speed and overall performance. This is done by optimizing code, compressing images and cleaning up databases. 
3. Functionality – It’s important to fix any broken links, update content and ensure smooth navigation. This will make sure that all forms and interactive elements are running smoothly. 
4. SEO ( Search Engine Optimization) – By updating your website regularly you can improve your search engine rankings. Search engines value well-maintained websites that load quickly and offer fresh and relevant content. 
5. User Experience – With regular maintenance you can monitor the user experience by fixing usability issues and addressing any bugs or errors promptly. This will help users engage, explore and return in the future. 

WordPress Websites

If your site is built on open source software, like WordPress, you need to pay attention to who is minding the store to keep your site in good shape.

WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems currently in use. Almost 65% of all websites that use a content management system are built on WordPress. The upside of using free open source software is that you are not tied to an expensive, proprietary subscription with limitations on flexibility and slow customer service response times. The trade off is that you do address website  maintenance either inhouse or by contracting out. 

What you need to understand is software, like WordPress, is not static. As security issues or functionality issues arise the developer community provides updates and patches that need to be implemented to protect your website, enhance usability, and ensure your online presence remains strong. There are a variety of types of updates including, WordPress core updates, updates to the plugins that you are using on your website, and PHP updates. PHP (The software the server runs to render WordPress). “Someone” needs to do that implementation. 

Another advantage to using WordPress as your website foundation is the wide range of plugins available to handle your website needs (e.g., contact forms, search engine optimization, add-ons that improve website speed and functionality for the user). However, like the WordPress core, plugins can also be vulnerable to security issues and plain old glitches that need to be fixed. 

In both situations, updates are a regular and expected occurrence and “someone” needs to attend to implementation.

First and foremost, neglecting maintenance leaves you vulnerable, from a security perspective – cyber insurance requirements anyone? Second, neglecting maintenance can result in things like contact forms malfunctioning which has an impact on your lead generation strategy. A poorly maintained website can mean broken links that go nowhere or to error pages and an overall negative user experience. That can lead to higher bounce rates.. Website users these days have a very short attention span and if your site is not performing well or causing them frustration there’s a very good chance they will leave (bounce) and not return. 

How Skunkworks can help you

At Skunkworks we work almost exclusively in WordPress. As a result, when we build websites for clients we offer them a basic WordPress maintenance package after launch. Our package is structured as a monthly retainer that provides the following:

• Installation of monitoring software to alert us to potential issues with your firm’s website and notifies us of when there are updates available. 
• Testing updates on a cloned version of your website on a “staging” server that we set up on your hosting platform. If the updates do not break the staging site we then apply them to your production (public-facing) website. If they do cause problems then working on a staging site allows us to troubleshoot without affecting your online presence.
• Reporting and recommendations for solutions in the event an update is incompatible with your existing site. While a basic maintenance package does not cover work that may be required to fix major issues that arise due to matters beyond our control, it does ensure that you know that issues exist that needs to be addressed.
• Ongoing review of WordPress notifications and development updates including, core development updates and minor core updates, such as maintenance and security releases.
• Vulnerability scanning and monitoring with a suite of security tools that alert us to problems (Automated, every 24 hours). This allows us to respond to things like server crashes or suspicious attempted login activity. 
• Database optimizations (Automated)
• Website backups (Automated stored on Amazon S3)
• Security checkup and vulnerability report, if necessary
• Performance enhancements and tweaks like working to improve site speed, a known factor in Google page rank.

What sets us apart? 

We have 25+ years of experience working with law firms on marketing projects including the design, development and maintenance of WordPress websites. We have had numerous clients come to us with pre-existing WordPress websites that were not maintained for one reason or another. We are adept at auditing WordPress websites, evaluating problems, recommending options to address those problems, and following through to implement selected solutions. We are happy to explain the “tech goop” in plain language to clients who would rather be practising law than trying to figure out which website plugin might be the best fit for their needs or tracking down an expired theme license that needs to be renewed. 

It’s not uncommon for us to see situations where a client is not aware of all the key info required to run their website or that information is not collated into one easily understandable document. Sometimes, we see situations where critical website infrastructure or accounts have been set up by a third party that is no longer with the firm and we’ve been instrumental in helping to retrieve that information and transferring it to firm ownership. Part of our remit is to put clients in a better position than we found them by making sure they are the owners of all accounts related to their websites and marketing platforms as well as helping them to understand what information is important to security and optimal website performance. In short, we explain, fix and maintain.