WordPress as a content management system (CMS) is the leading website platform in use today. With over 450 million active sites, the platform powers about 40% of all websites on the internet.
But this popularity comes with risks: If you don’t take care of your WordPress maintenance needs, your nonprofit is vulnerable to major problems, such as your website being compromised by hackers or it breaking during important fundraising events.
Could you imagine experiencing downtimes during #GivingTuesday or any other major fundraising campaign?
A managed WordPress host is a solution that makes it possible for someone who doesn’t have the technical know-how (or the time) to host their own WordPress site. They take care of all the maintenance so your nonprofit can focus on what matters most: Changing lives. Here are some of the most important benefits these types of hosts can provide for your organization:
1. Better Security
Even though cyber attacks are on the rise, organizations are still not doing enough to protect themselves. According to NTEN, about 68.2% of nonprofits don’t have documented policies and procedures in case of a cyber attack.
Not only can these attacks be expensive for your nonprofit—the average cost to businesses affected by a data breach in the U.S. is $8.64 million—but also lead to legal problems if your donors’ information is exposed.
Have you ever wondered why the apps on your phone get updates so frequently?
More often than not, it’s because the developer is releasing a fix for a bug that could be used as an attack vector if left unchecked—the same happens in WordPress. The majority of hacking attacks come from vulnerabilities found in outdated versions of WordPress, plugins, and themes, so it’s crucial that you keep these things up-to-date.
A managed WordPress host will take this task off your hands by performing it automatically and sending alerts whenever a vulnerability is found in a plugin installed on your site. Some managed hosts also handle things like security and caching on their servers. So, users don’t need to install third-party plugins that can cause compatibility issues and break their websites.
However, when it comes to website security, there’s much more that nonprofits need to take into account. For a more in-depth look into cybersecurity for nonprofits, feel free to explore this guide on how to defend against hackers.
2. Better Reliability
One of the most frustrating things that a website can experience is downtime. For a nonprofit, this could mean data loss, damaged brand reputation, and revenue loss—especially if the outage occurs during important fundraising events.
Most of the time, websites are down due to poor-quality web hosting. This is especially true for shared hosting providers. These providers tend to oversell their servers, and when the server gets too busy, your site becomes slow, gets 500 errors, or even goes down completely.
Not only can shared hosts cause longer and more frequent downtimes, but also security issues.
Sharing the same server with others means that if another user is sending out spam, it can get the server IP blacklisted and cause your emails to hit your recipients’ spam folder as well—this is one of the many reasons why you should separate email and web hosting. Additionally, if another user happens to be running outdated software, it will make everyone on the server more vulnerable to hackers.
While shared hosts might be okay for hobby blogs, mission-critical nonprofit websites should consider moving to a managed WordPress host. Managed hosts tend to provide better containerization to keep websites separate from each other so issues with your neighbors don’t affect your website at all.
3. Faster Load Times
If your nonprofit has been running for quite some time and you’ve been trying to handle website maintenance yourself, chances are you’ve installed several plugins throughout the years.
In a perfect world, all plugins would be well-coded and you could install as many as you’d like without having to worry about potential issues. Unfortunately, each plugin adds its PHP, JavaScript, and other files to your website, which require more processing power and can lead to slow performance and compatibility issues.
What do longer load times mean for your nonprofit?
According to Google, about 53% of users leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. This means frustrated visitors (AKA potential donors) and loss in fundraising revenue.
If that isn’t enough of an issue, Google also started taking into account other page experience signals called Core Web Vitals that include page speed, user experience, and responsiveness as ranking factors.
The majority of managed WordPress hosts take care of optimization, backups, and maintenance so you don’t have to worry about installing extra plugins.
For example, Nexcess provides constant security monitoring, premium security tools like iThemes Security Pro, built-in multi-layered caching, image compression, and even Nexcess CDN (content delivery network) to decrease server load and increase website speed.
While you can certainly optimize your WordPress site on other types of hosting providers, it will require a bit of trial and error on your part. With a managed host, you’ll be able to avoid the hassles of server maintenance and optimization.
4. Automated Backups
One of the most important aspects of maintaining your WordPress site is keeping a backup.
Whether you’re editing your theme, testing new plugins, or running an update, it’s always a good idea to create a backup before starting. Additionally, backups will allow you to easily restore your site and important donor information in case your nonprofit gets hacked or server issues cause your website to break—think of backups as website insurance.
For backups to give you good insurance, they should be done frequently—ideally every day. However, it’s very unlikely that you’ll be able to maintain a backup schedule without automated tools. Even if you are someone who stays on top of everything, mistakes can happen along the way.
Most managed WordPress hosts allow you to set up daily automatic backups of your website and provide a one-click restore option to make things even easier.
One thing to keep in mind is that regardless of how cautious you are, it’s almost impossible to prevent bad things from ever happening—and you shouldn’t wait until a crisis hits to figure out how to respond to it.
This is why nonprofits not only need to pay attention to WordPress maintenance but also have a crisis communication plan in place.
Get Started with Managed Hosting
Onboarding, fundraising, marketing, budgeting, and data analysis—all of these things (and more) are on your nonprofit’s plate.
Why add WordPress maintenance to that list?
A managed web host like Nexcess can handle everything from security patches, plugin updates, website backups, speed optimization, spam filtering, malware scanning, monitoring site performance, CDNs, and more.
If you want to spend less time worrying about technical issues and more time making sure that your nonprofit is putting its best foot forward online, Nexcess can get you started with a free website migration and no downtime.
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