I’ll forgive you for thinking that sorting your website out is a one-time thing. Many people think you can slap your website on the internet and leave it. This couldn’t be further from the truth, and we’re going to go into the reasons why. Ensuring that you maintain your website consistently and effectively is critical to maintaining your online presence, customer safety, and organisation’s integrity. Website maintenance can also be very time-consuming, so you must have the right team in place. Otherwise, you’ll fail miserably, and you won’t get the best out of it.
So, what is website maintenance? This itself is defined as the process of maintaining your website by completing tasks relating to keeping your website up to date and making sure that all functionalities work as they should. This is a bit vague for you, I know. Going a bit deeper, it can involve checking your website’s speed, the quality of your SEO, correcting errors, and more. It also covers any updates you want to make. Wouldn’t you want to have the same old website for your whole business lifetime?
Website Maintenance Improves Cybersecurity
One of the first things you need to think about when maintaining your website is security. I know, ‘it’s not going to happen to you, not a cyberattack. That line of thinking is dangerous and wrong. Even the most prominent companies fall victim to attacks. Take, for example, Equifax. One of the world’s biggest credit checking agencies, with a massive database and, got hacked. This happened in 2017, and the extent of the hack was huge. Over 150 Million people had their records accessed and stolen. This was caused when Equifax failed to update its third-party software.
Of course, it can be argued that this has nothing to do with website maintenance. Let me refute that point. There will be times when the software and plugins that power your website will need to be updated. This is the point of maintenance. If you fail to do this, you’re going to be exposing your customers to needless risk. If you’re a UK company, you also run the risk of falling afoul of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). They state that you must report a breach within 72-hours, and violations can lead to disciplinary action being taken by the ICO, including fines.
Maintaining Your Website Will Boost Your Traffic
You want to get found on Google. That’s the whole point of having a website, getting it seen by people online. If you’re not updating your website and maintaining it consistently, your online presence on Google is going to suffer drastically. This is because Google places a lot of emphasis on regularly updated websites, pushing them further up in the rankings. A higher ranking means more people are coming to your site and more sales for your business. If I’m honest, I only ever go onto the second page of Google or further when I’m researching for a client. That should tell you a lot about the importance of updating your site for SEO.
When you’re maintaining your website to rank higher on Google, there are a couple of things you can do. Firstly, you should think about blogging. I blog daily to improve the SEO and traffic on our website. You don’t have to do it daily, but it is suggested that you should do it 3-4 times a week. You should also focus on taking out broken links, remove redundant pages and check for spelling and grammar errors. This way, you’ll rank a lot higher on Google.
Website Maintenance Can Engage Your Audience
Website maintenance is an incredibly effective way of improving engagement and visitor experience. This is because when you’re updating your site with content that can be shared, you’re giving your visitors an insight into your business. They’ll come to understand more about your culture and will be more likely to share your content. This will ultimately be a big part of how you will get more website traffic and direct sales. Think about it like this. Your website is the shop window of your business. If you owned a shop, would you let your window gather dust and fail to update it? Of course, you wouldn’t.
If I haven’t already convinced you that website maintenance is vital for engagement, let me further. You want to make sure that you’re giving yourself maximum visibility on your site. This means giving people as much useful content to consume as possible. This could be your social media timeline, blog content, on-site videos and more. If you don’t update, you’re not going to get as much engagement as you won’t be seen as relevant anymore. So, get updating your website with new content so you can wow your audience. I’m rooting for you!
Website Maintenance Will Help Your Reputation
Let’s think about business reputation. Say, for example, I go on a website, and I’m looking for an accountant to handle my tax needs. When I’m looking through websites for an accountant, I’m not going to want to use a business that rarely updates its website. If the copyright symbol at the bottom is in the wrong year, I’m also going to be turned off using their services. The reason for this is that if the company can’t be bothered to update their website correctly, how can I trust them to handle my tax? It’s effortless.
From this example, you can probably see the reputational impact of updating your website. This is why you should always make sure that every piece of content on your site is up to date and accurately reflects your business. You should also consistently put up new content on your site so that new visitors can see that you’re an active business. This is very important in retaining new website visitors. This could even be as simple as going back and editing an old article to reflect recent events about the subject you’re writing about. So, get your reputation sorted and update your site.
Website Maintenance Will Affect Performance
This is something that comes under the veil of customer experience, for sure. I don’t stay on websites that take ages to load. I imagine you don’t either. There’s a lot of statistical evidence to prove this too. Studies have shown that more than 40% of visitors will click away from your website if it takes more than three seconds for it to load. Ultimately, I know this will cost your business a lot of money in missed opportunities. So, you want to make sure that your website loads quicker Thankfully, I can advise you.
Many things influence website speed. Firstly, you need to make sure your site isn’t built on a theme. This is because they come with lots of junk data and unneeded functions that will slow your site. You also need to look at your hosting company’s quality as the differences in speed can be massive. Don’t be afraid to put your hand in your pocket to overcome this. Additionally, the more things you add to your site, the slower it will be. This is why it is important to consistently maintain your website so that you can strip away the deadwood and get back to your usual, speedy self.
Website Backups Are An Important Part of Maintenance
This is something that people don’t usually think about until it’s too late. If you somehow delete a necessary file or piece of code on your website and you haven’t backed it up, there’s a good chance you’ll be stuck. Thankfully, you don’t necessarily have to manually back up your site and files. There are programs out there that can help you automatically back everything up, even daily for some of them. This takes out the manual effort of a task that can be considered tedious and mind-numbing but is no less critical. So, I suggest you choose how you want to back up your site.
It may seem a little preachy, me going on about this. I do it for a good reason, though. For example, if you didn’t back up your site and suffered a cyberattack or accidentally deleted something, your entire site could be gone. Think about all of the wasted hours toiling over content, building the perfect home page and all of the maintenance that you’ve already done. To lose all of that work can be soul-crushing, I should know, I’ve experienced it before- don’t let it happen to you.
How To Test Website Performance
There are so many different tools out there that can help you test your website’s performance. I would say the three that I would recommend for you to use the most are WooRank, which provides you with a structured report on your website SEO quality. It also gives you actionable tips on improving it, which makes WooRank a godsend. Additionally, if you’re looking to test your website’s speed, you can use PageSpeed Insights by Google. This is a beautiful tool that lets you put your website URL in, and it will give you a score on your website speed. Like WooRank, this tool will also give you tips for improvement.
When optimising your content on your site for SEO, a great plugin to use would be Yoast SEO. We use this on the Driven Media Solutions website, and it tells you how easy the text on your website is to read and a score for your SEO. Similarly to WooRank, it will give you tips on improving your score. Using tools like these is a great place to start, especially if you’re not too familiar with maintaining your website effectively.
Do You Need Professional Help With This?
If you’ve been going through this article and you’re thinking to yourself, “I don’t know how to do this”, or, “I don’t have time to do this”, that’s okay. I don’t blame you. It can be very time-consuming. This is why we offer our Website Care package. This package covers all of the things that we’ve spoken about in this article. We’ll update all of your software and plugins to improve your security, help you get new content on your website, and optimise your site’s speed so that it becomes lightning fast. What more can you ask for from us?
In addition to the services mentioned above, we’ll also monitor any potential website blackouts that occur. Then, we’ll diagnose the problem and come to you with solutions to fix it. I don’t want you to worry about the possibility of deleting crucial website files or having the website deleted. We’ll make sure that your website is regularly saved, just if the worst happens. If you want to find out more about this, you can get in touch with me using the contact info on our website, and I’ll be happy to walk through things with you.
Conclusion
So, there you have it! After reading this article, you should have a better understanding of why website maintenance is so critical for your business. You want to make sure that you and your customer’s personal information are safe from cyberattacks that can occur in old systems. You’ll also find that updating your site will lead to an increase in your website traffic and will boost your reputation with new visitors.
You should also now know that maintaining your website is a critical part of it loading quickly, which is vital for keeping people interested. We’ve gone through the ideal tools you can use to do this. When you’re going through all the effort to update your website and add new content, you need to make sure that you’re backing this information up if the worst happens. If you’re finding it hard to keep on top of all of the work with maintaining your website, you can get in touch with me, and I’ll be happy to help you.