So, your website is now live and looking good…but now what?
Online and digital never stay still. There is always a new cyber threat to be aware of, a new theme update to install, a blog post to put live to keep content fresh, and more.
This means your website must never stand still, and this is where web maintenance comes in.
Allowing you to ensure your website continues running at full capacity and operating effectively, web maintenance takes over when your website goes live.
Helping to keep things safe, in good working order and protecting your business reputation and, ultimately, your profit margins – web maintenance is not a business operation to ignore.
What is web maintenance?
Website maintenance is a series of checks and performance reviews that a web developer will carry out on your site regularly to ensure your site avoids downtime, remains up to date, and is free from errors.
Regular maintenance is essential for your site to support your business and help it achieve its objectives, whether this is to engage more with your target audience, increase sales, or simply have an online presence.
Of course, the level of maintenance required will vary; however, if you want your website to work properly, you must keep an eye on it. Ideally, we recommend maintenance once per month; however, some areas of your website may require more frequent maintenance, and this should be discussed with your web developer and built into an ongoing support plan.
What does web maintenance cover….
….and why is it important?
Keeps your site safe and secure
We’re all aware of cyber-attacks, and cyber criminals exploiting vulnerabilities online to steal businesses’ identities and data, hence the importance of keeping your security patches and software up to date.
With regular site maintenance, you can minimise hackers exploiting outdated software and vulnerabilities and have peace of mind that your content and data are safe and secure.
Security maintenance can include ensuring firewalls are up to date, putting monitoring tools in place so you can be more proactive if a threat is detected, and removing malicious software asap, stopping cybercriminals in their tracks.
Cyber-attacks cost businesses thousands of pounds in damages, don’t be a victim of such attacks; make sure security is at the top of your website maintenance checklist.
Protected if something goes wrong
Website maintenance means regular backups. Ensuring that everything that needs to be backed up is backed up, your data is protected, and your reputation remains intact.
You can have complete peace of mind that if you experience any technical issues or errors, previous versions of your site are available, allowing you to continue operating online without causing any disruption to your users.
Improves SEO
Those top-rated websites on Google are those websites that are regularly updated and maintained.
Why?
Because it shows a commitment to search engines like Google that you are working toward providing relevant and fresh information to your users as well as maintaining both inbound and outbound links (checking that all links work and link to the correct pages/content is vital in maintaining high SEO).
With improved SEO, you can increase the number of new visitors to your site, boost returning traffic, and increase sales opportunities.
Fresh content
Your website must stay up to date if it is to stay relevant and rank highly – fresh content draws visitors in and increases engagement. Let’s face it no one will be eager to come back and visit a website that hasn’t been updated in months.
Instead, the more you maintain and update your site with relevant and fresh content, the more opportunity you give visitors to learn more about you and boost engagement.
People buy from brands they relate to. Make your content purposeful for your target audience.
Keeps performance consistent
Your website’s functionality, speed, and overall performance must remain high for users to stay with you rather than jump onto your competitor’s fully functioning high-speed website.
This means keeping the backend of your site up to date, installing the relevant security patches, software updates, ensuring coding is up to date, and updates to plugins and themes are applied, especially if your website has users and user management is a big part of your day-to-day, i.e., membership organisations, managing subscriptions, etc.
This leads on to….
Improved responsiveness
Having a presence online means you need to deliver what your users want, and this may mean adapting your site to different devices, putting the user front and centre, and again hitting those all-important business objectives.
As part of your website maintenance, you should include regular monitoring of your customer journey. What are people viewing, links clicked, where do they drop off, and at what stage are customers lost?
Your website maintenance should monitor website loading time (optimising performance), accessibility (everyone should be able to access your site), navigation, and content.
The key is to use the data and information from your website maintenance to keep everything as smooth and effective as possible.
Boost your reputation
Think about how visitors to your site will feel when a link they try to access doesn’t work or they can’t navigate your site with ease and find the information they want. What if your website experiences more downtime than live time?
All of these elements and more will negatively affect your reputation and turn people against you.
Don’t fall behind your competition. Maintain your website to a high standard and keep your business reputation at the top of its game.
Next steps….
At Arkay, we believe that your website is never complete. There is always work to do to make it better. You must continually ensure your site is achieving its objectives and meeting your business requirements.
Websites are an investment, and we know you want to maintain that investment. We also understand that website maintenance is a big commitment, but it is one you can’t afford not to take.
That’s why we provide the highest quality, professional website maintenance packages around.
Protecting your business, data, security, information, and so much more.
Contact us today to see how we can help you.
What’s your web maintenance plan?