10 Reasons Why Website Maintenance Is Important
Not only do you need a website for advertising the products and services that your business offers, you also need it to build your brand image and get customer reviews or feedback. Many business owners and CEOs often think that website development is a one-time project, but they are so wrong – a website is forever a work-in-progress.
Your website is an important asset required for the smooth running of your business and the digital space keeps rapidly changing, your website requires regular updates and routine maintenance so that it can perform optimally all year round.
Here are 10 reasons why you should include website maintenance in your website development budget and why you should ensure that you hire a working website maintenance team for your business.
1. Regular Content Updates
It is very important that the content on your website is regularly updated through periodic website maintenance so that your site’s visitors can keep coming back. A regular update of relevant content does not only make your website more interesting, it also helps your site rank high in Internet search.
Routine website maintenance gives you a great opportunity to fine-tune your content, so you can review your keywords and phrases to grab the interests of your site’s visitors and ultimately generate more leads and increase conversion rates.
Examples of contents to regularly update on your website include the company news section – where you get to mention the latest news about your organisation, such as promotions, appointments, awards and honors etc., giveaway or contest – give a service or product away so you can generate more traffic for your website and use it as a promotional campaign.
2. Security and Protection
Because hackers are always at large looking for websites with security gaps or vulnerabilities to exploit, it is suggested that you have a capable website maintenance team in place to perform periodical maintenance so they can spot bugs on your site and promptly fix them to forestall attacks.
With the service of a website maintenance team, you will be able to keep your website software updated to latest versions and also install any available security patches. They will also help you to remove any infection or threat if your website gets affected.
Website maintenance strategies may also include, using strong and secure passwords, removing old and outdated applications and backups and ensuring that no sensitive temporary files are available on your site.
3. Working Backup
By having and following a regular website maintenance schedule, it allows you to have a reliable backup in case your system crashes or something else happens to your website’s source program. It is easier to recover with a working backup than it is to have to start building up your website again from scratch.
Hence, professional website maintenance teams usually back up two website elements: the source code (Javascript, PHP, HTML, CSS codes and other plugins) after every update, and the website’s content – such as text, images, video or audio files. This is necessary in order to prevent loss of files, plugins and/or content.
4. New Products and Services
If your company has reviewed or rolled out some new products and services, then it is important that you list these new offers and exciting features online. This is a way to stay in business and keep your company in the competitive market. Without regular website maintenance and flexible website development strategies, you’ll likely have outdated and unavailable offers listed on your website to the disgust of your visitors and prospective customers.
5. Compatibility with New Technology
The Internet is a rapidly-evolving space as new techniques and technologies are being rolled up and implemented for a better user experience. So, it is required for companies with online presence to regularly review the compatibility of their websites with the latest technologies.
For example, users might have challenges while trying to access your website from their mobile devices if you do not have a mobile-friendly website. However, website maintenance teams need to regularly review their use of Internet technologies and techniques to implement the latest technologies that will make the website compatible and working properly on all devices.
6. Cost Savings
Should any mishap befall your website – maybe it gets hacked and you do not have a backup to restore it – that means every dime you spend on website development just went down the drain, and you’ll need to hire the service of another website development expert to build a new website, which is extra cost in your budget.
The hit of your website’s downtime could especially take a huge toll on your brand if you run a business that heavily depends on online presence for getting new leads or sell products. That amounts to losses and loss of competitive advantage that could have been rightly prevented if you can hire an adroit website maintenance team to promptly fix all errors and bugs on your site.
7. Improved User Experience
Lead generation and improved conversion rates are a product of an effective website maintenance plan overseen by a competent maintenance team.
It is important that your website meets the visitor’s expectations. This means that strategies to improve user experience and eventually transform to conversion should be done regularly on your website. A poorly functioning website is bad for the brand image you want to sell to new clients, as well as to your existing clients and customers. So, hiring a website maintenance team can help you fix technical issues like page loading errors, broken links, poor grammar, spelling errors and other issues that may arise eventually after website development.
8. Proper Monitoring and Tracking
When you dedicate appropriate time and resources to website maintenance, you can properly track if you are still in line with your online marketing goals. Checking the metrics of your website gives you an insight into the progress of your campaigns so you can decide on the next strategy or plans to implement.
If you are behind on your sales goals through your website, that implies that you need to revamp your website development techniques and implement new strategies to help you meet your sales target, but you may never know this without website maintenance handled by a competent maintenance team.
9. Promotion of Brand Image
Many business owners do not really see the necessity for website maintenance or the importance of hiring a maintenance team to oversee it. Do not forget that your website and its performance ultimately shape how people perceive and rate your corporate image.
Your website’s performance, its loading speed and other variables all depend on the quality and integrity of the domain host, and contents and plugins & themes – keeping your website’s software, themes and plugins up to date affects the overall performance and ensures your website is performing at its best, while also optimising the user experience.
Hence, if your website is not up-to-date with the latest technologies and trends, visitors will definitely question the quality of the services you are offering. Should your website not meet the standards expected of a professional site, your customers will go elsewhere.
On the other hand, if you periodically review and keep your website development techniques up to date, visitors will be thrilled with your content and trust your business for integrity and accountability.
10. Compatibility with Latest Algorithms and Tools
Search engines usually rate sites that are fast, error free, well maintained and contain fresh content high in their rankings. So, when you regularly update and maintain your website, your website climbs up in the search results.
In order to optimise your SEO rankings, adequate website maintenance will help you adjust to the demands of dynamic search engine algorithms. Hence, including website maintenance as part of your website development campaign helps you to position your website and business for better hits.
If you have read this whole article, you now know why website development is not just enough, you need to maintain your website too. And if you don’t have the time or skills needed to maintain your site yourself, it’s best to employ the services of a maintenance team. You have a lot to gain from regular website maintenance than not doing it at all.
