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I have noticed that one of the biggested issues that webmasters have, especially ones that have just gotten started, is maintenance of their websites. Scripts like VB, phpBB, phpDirectory, ZenCart, Wordpress, etc all update frequently. It is one of the most important things to keep up with the updates. I think that this should be right up there with adding new content frequently, and probably should be number one. There are a lot of webmasters out there that start up too many sites and then do not have the time to update all of them with scripts, content, links etc. And the one that is usually left out is the scripts. This is because there is no easy metric to show that spending time on the updating of the scripts will make you any more money. This is a huge mistake and I will explain why below.

Script writers update for a reason, normally the small updates between large releases are for security fixes. If you are not careful, then your website can be comprimised. If you are lucky, the only thing that will happen is the hacker would simply deface you site and leave it at that. Worst case would be they take all of your user data and delete the site. Neither of these make you look professional, and you WILL lose traffic, especially from those users who may have only started visiting your site regularly.

Now imagine if this happened while you were away from the computer for an extended period, everyone needs a vacation now and then, and your site was defaced. Well you could be looking at a site that will be offline for a long time, and the full extent of the damage may not be visable until longer term.

Even though I am harping on this, I am also a person that sometimes forgets to do this myself. I have one VB site that hasn’t been updated in a while, simply because it is not fun. I have a lot of templates to change and on top of that there are a lot fo hacks and addons that I will have to update at the same time. To make this process less painful I follow a simply stragety. Signup for the mailing lists of all of your major scripts, and every week ensure that you are updated. If you have more that half a dozen sites you may want to stretch that some, but make sure that you at least catch all of the major, well known bug fixes.

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