Why Website Maintenance Is a Must In 2025 | Ep 56 | TradesSecrets: Contractor Marketing Podcast

Devon Hayes:

Welcome, welcome. All right. We’ve got a fun-filled episode today. We’re talking about website hosting as a service, and the importance of it. Riveting stuff. But we’ll try to keep it short and sweet, keep it simplified so you understand exactly what that means

Amanda Joyce:

Exactly. So, hold onto your hats, guys. This is going to be a good one.

Devon Hayes:

Welcome to Trade Secrets, where we demystify digital marketing to help contractors get the most bang for their marketing bucks.

Amanda Joyce:

This is for you, if you’re a contractor looking for actionable marketing insights.

Devon Hayes:

Learn from home services industry experts to elevate your business through simplified marketing strategies.

Amanda Joyce:

Let’s dive into today’s trade secret.

Okay. So this is probably not a topic that many of you have been googling or even thinking about, so that’s why we decided to talk about it. It’s something when we chat with contractors about, they’re like, “Do I really need that?” And the answer is absolutely.

Devon Hayes:

Yes, so we’re talking about hosting as a service, but website maintenance as a service. This can be done really inexpensively, and it really should be. We like to talk about this as the best way, to break it down, is that hosting is where your website lives, which server it lives on. You might have GoDaddy as a host, or Bluehost, Amazon hosting. Basically, that’s just where all the files that combine to make your website, where do they live, where are they stored. Your files are stored on your computer, but files for a website are stored on a server. And that server is where your website is what’s called hosted. So that’s kind of the easy explanation of that. Now, where hosting becomes a service and not just your website sitting somewhere on a server is maintaining that server. So, you have to keep that thing cleaned up and keep it up to date.

And the other piece that is important is the website maintenance portion. So you’ve got your server maintenance portion, and then you’ve got your website, your personal website. So your website could sit on a server with lots of other websites, right? But what if you have a bad neighbor and they’re not maintaining their website? That opens up that site to cyber attacks and vulnerabilities, like outdated plugins, for example. A lot of you that have WordPress sites, maybe that’s something that sounds familiar. There’s plugins that get updated, your content management system gets updated. WordPress itself, that platform gets updated and operates on different PHP levels.

So, pretty much every time that there’s an update and you’re not keeping your site maintained, you could be exposing yourself to hackers and vulnerabilities, and things that will, not only inhibit your website, but everybody else on the server once they find a way in.

So, all this is to say, maintaining your website on a monthly basis and keeping things up to date, it should be kind of just one of those overhead expenses, it should be something that you do, and it’s not like get a website built and forget about it forevermore. You really do need to maintain it.

Amanda Joyce:

But before we hopped on here too, we were kind of talking about, okay, what’s this mean for the end user? And one of the things that you pointed out that I think is really critical is a lot of folks that if you do store contact information on the back end of your website for people that are filling out your forms and then you get hacked, you’re risking losing being hacked with the contact information of existing clients and potential clients, and talk about making yourself look pretty irresponsible if they suddenly find out that they were part of a cyber attack.

Devon Hayes:

For us, you pay $199 a month and we will maintain your website. We have a separate kind of hosting fee outside of that. But it really is, it’s just critical to your business, it’s critical to how your website runs. And it’s important for you to know that you’re on a server where the other sites are being maintained. If you’ve got a site, if you’re sharing a server, picture it as your house and your neighbor’s house, and your neighbor’s house becomes a rental, and the renters don’t give a shit and there’s trash all over the yard, they’re devaluing your house because of now there’s rodents and there’s pests, and there’s things that are invading their home that now infect your property, that’s really what this is. If you are not maintaining your property, you’re exposing everybody else on the server to your shit, because you’re not taking care of it.

And what that does is, if a site’s vulnerable, you have a crappy neighbor, let’s say, and they get hacked, and they are getting spammed with 500,000 bot form fills a day, you might say, “Well, that’s their house and I’m over here and it doesn’t matter.” It does matter, because the land that you share, the server, you only have so much bandwidth, and now it’s getting sucked up by the garbage, and the rodents, and their termites, and their rats are now starting to impact how fast your site loads, and the experience that your users have when they come to your site. Is it taking forever and you’ve done everything you can on your end? Well, what about your bad neighbor who’s sucking up all the bandwidth? You can’t do anything about it when you’re on a shared server.

And when you have hosting as a service through someone who does have a private server, typically people with a private server, they do impeccable maintenance on it, and they know who your neighbors are. So they can go knocking on their neighbor’s door and say, “Hey, clean it up, clean it up,” and put some locks in place if the neighbor doesn’t clean it up on their own. So, that’s how it impacts you. That’s how being a bad neighbor and having a crappy neighbor, that’s why you don’t want to do it. You don’t want to have a bad neighbor, you don’t want to be a bad neighbor. You don’t want to be that guy on the block.

Amanda Joyce:

Yeah, no one wants to be that guy. And doesn’t it like, just plugins alone, I mean, there’s constant updates to plugins, and if you’re three updates behind, can’t it just suddenly start impeding the way the site’s even performing at all, or break the site altogether?

Devon Hayes:

Yeah, it can break. So that’s difficult about it and why we don’t encourage business owners to just log in and click update, update, update, when you get a notification that a new update is available. Sometimes the update with your form plugin conflicts with the latest version of your content management system, so that when you click update, all of a sudden maybe now this field becomes invisible on your form for some reason. Or the submit button is gone and you’re like, “I can’t even submit a form.” Those are conflicts from the different things within the site, which is why it’s just save yourself the headache and have a developer do it for you. Because I’ve made that mistake where I’m like, “Oh, I’ll just help them out. I’ll just go click update.” And then our dev team is like, “What?” This was years ago before I knew any better, but 10 years ago.

But that’s what happens. Because nothing updates at the same time. So WordPress can roll out a new update, and then the plugins realize, “Oh gosh, my plugin now conflicts with that update.” So then they have to update their plugin to then be up to speed with this one. But in the meantime, things aren’t working for your website, and something that’s worked all along all of a sudden breaks. That’s why, because of these updates. And there are so many that happen every month. And sometimes you need to keep the old version, like one version behind, until there’s a new version because of the theme on your website, which has to do with how it’s built. Sometimes there’s conflicts there.

But you need someone who does this every day to tell you, “You’re fine. This is why there’s no vulnerabilities here, but we’re keeping you on this version of this piece of the site. Because if we don’t, then this functionality disappears from what is on the live site.”

So, a lot of tech talk, but hopefully that helps you understand the importance of it. There’s a lot of great providers out there, and I think it’s just for us, we really encourage you to know who your neighbors are on a server if you can.

Amanda Joyce:

Okay. So people are listening today and they’re like, “Okay, it sounds like I need that. What do I do next?” What’s your recommendation, Devon? Do they just first reach out to their host and confirm if this is already a service they’re being provided?

Devon Hayes:

Great question. If they’re working with an agency, they should ask the agency, if they’re providing those websites updates. If you built a website and you know you’re not paying an IT guy, and you know you’re not paying an agency right now, you’re running kind of slim, a lot of you guys are in networking groups, start there. There’s usually an agency in the group that can perform those updates and changes for you. We only do it for the websites that are on our server, because we have total control there. But if you’re on GoDaddy for example, I think they’ve got a monthly maintenance, a low fee where they do it for you.

So, just look into it. It really is not that expensive. And that’s because some months you win, and you only have an hour and a half or two hours, and some months you lose, where there’s a massive update, and there’s all these conflicts, and there’s six to 10 hours of work, but you see the same price.

So start by, I would ask someone local that you know, because then you can make sure it’s happening. But if you’re in a big box host, they probably already have the website maintenance service as an add-on. So that’s what you want to look for, is a website maintenance service.

Amanda Joyce:

Right. Awesome.

Devon Hayes:

Sweet. The more you know. Ahh! Ding! Rainbow!

Amanda Joyce:

Questions, comments, did we miss something? Please comment below. Let us know what your thoughts are, and hopefully you guys found this educational.

Devon Hayes:

Yes. And check out the graphic. It helps explain this technical thing. I did a fun illustration with houses and neighbors and land, and then that crappy neighbor, so check it out. Hopefully, that helps provide some clarity around what exactly hosting and website maintenance as a service is. Thanks, guys.

Amanda Joyce:

Thanks guys.

That was today’s trade secret. Thanks for listening.

Devon Hayes:

Did you find this helpful? We’re just getting started.

Amanda Joyce:

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Devon Hayes:

Until next time.