18 Reasons Website Maintenance and Planned Updates Are Important

As 95% of our development business revolves around WordPress retainers, the topic of ongoing updates and recurring contracts comes up during every presales call. Working with clients who switch agencies is easier (as they already understand the benefits of a technical partnership), but site rebuilds are often a challenge in that department. And the most common question is: "Why do I need to pay for maintenance once our new site is live?" While there are plenty of excuses not to keep your project up to date, my favorite analogy is derived from the automotive industry. You don't buy a car… Continue Reading

On WordPress, Windows, Knowledge and Testing

I had an interesting conversation with a friend earlier today. It started with the persistent state of WordPress in some point of time, backing up and restoring a state after a failure, testing plugins here and there and keeping the site as useful, flexible and stable as possible at the same time. The gist of that was the conflict between "keeping up and using the best tools" and "making the software fast and stable". Windows I haven't been using Windows for several years now, but I am supporting and maintaining my family's hardware and software (and there is a Windows-specific… Continue Reading

How Does WordPress Maintain Backward Compatibility Over Time?

Backward compatibility is one of the pillars of the platform that comes with the highest priority. Over the past ten years, the technological progress in WordPress has been moving somewhat slowly, but that ensures that no WordPress website would be left behind. For quite some time now, WordPress is officially supporting all PHP versions starting from PHP 5.2.4. Of course, PHP 7 is the recommended version for all hosts, but it would be unfair to bump it up to 5.6 and screw tens of millions of websites that still run on low-quality hosting infrastructures. Stats gathered by all websites running… Continue Reading