What’s the Importance of Website Maintenance?
If you own a car, a computer or home appliances, you probably know the importance of on-going professional maintenance to keep these necessary tools operating at their best. Maintenance is crucial for the health, performance and functionality of websites too. It’s also vital to your Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Launching a professionally designed website is only half the battle; keeping it up to date and properly maintained is equally important as there is a lot “under-the-hood” of a modern commercial-grade website. The definition of “website maintenance” is quite extensive and can be likened to keeping your website “healthy”. For example, it involves tasks such as ensuring security, resolving errors, enhancing user engagement, updating plug-ins, regularly updating content, and more.
Why should you care about the health of your website? Your search ranking and visitor experience depends on it. Search engine algorithms look for healthy websites, and will rank those higher than similar sites that are old, busted and broken.
What are the Key Elements of Effective Website Maintenance?
- Broken links and forms: These need to be checked and identified to ensure your website functions properly. If a form doesn’t work, you may miss out on valuable feedback or a reach-out from a potential client. Users of your website may notice errors, or if they don’t, they may mistakenly believe their information was successfully received when it actually wasn’t. Broken links can occasionally occur, which means your users won’t be able to access the intended information you provided a link for.
- Checking for spam or hacking: This is crucial for web maintenance, especially when it comes to the security of your site. Checking for malicious code or other hacking is important for several reasons. Hackers tend to target websites that appear inactive or dormant. Even in the unfortunate event your website gets hacked, regularly checking your website allows you to quickly identify if this has occurred. Inappropriate blog articles, products, or links can be placed in the site, but maintaining your website means you or someone else will spot these issues before they become a big problem or legal hassle.
- Adding Content: It’s easy to forget to remove the team members who left the company recently or to update the phone numbers that changed, but these are some of the simple content errors that appear on unmaintained websites. You should also consider updating content on your site’s pages as well as adding blogs or case studies on a regular basis. Since we all love to write, this shouldn’t be a problem… right?
- Keeping a backup of your site: Make sure a backup of your whole and most current site version is stored by your hosting provider or IT team in case you ever need to revert to a previous version due to a malicious hack or technology breakdown. Your backup will need to be updated each time site maintenance is performed.
- Design updates: Keeping track of whether your website needs a design update is also important. You want to make sure users are engaged when viewing your site, which means having up-to-date and visually appealing design elements and perhaps some new images. After all, this could be a customer’s first impression of your business and you’ll want to impress.
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Effective Website Maintenance: More Things to Consider
There’s many things you can do to continually improve your website, and there are also some outside factors which can impact it. As an example, search engines make frequent updates to their own search algorithms and websites that website owners must keep up with. These updates often affect your website’s SEO. Briefly, SEO is essentially the marketing strategies utilized to improve the ranking in which your website appears on web search.
To ensure your business’ website stays at the very top when searched in a web browser, attention needs to be paid to things like keywords, headlines, back-links, page loading speed, responsiveness, and other factors which influence SEO. For instance, Google algorithms rank your site depending on these factors and their algorithms undergo many updates each year. That’s one of the reasons it’s important to maintain your site to keep up with search-platforms’ changes.
Besides SEO, you should be concerned with the technical parts of owning your website. Your website’s domain must be renewed each period, whether that’s annually or for a multi-year lease. You should also be aware of data and analytics about your website and its traffic. And, as stated before, you should also make sure you have a backup of your site saved in case you have to revert to a previous version. This measure is important in case something were to go wrong in your site.
Hiring Professionals vs. DIY: Choosing the Right Approach for Website Maintenance
If this list of web maintenance tasks seem like a lot, handing it off to a professional website maintenance team may be the way to go. You can pay an agency which handles website maintenance as their specialty, or make a schedule and DIY it. Regularly scheduled website maintenance will give you peace of mind and confidence in your up-to-date website. If you intend to tackle these tasks by yourself, you’ll want to have both the time and knowledge necessary.
If your site can be considered dormant, or if you feel other areas of your business require your expert attention, then hiring a team to perform web maintenance on your site might be the way to go. This is best done by purchasing a website maintenance package from a reputable company which offers such services. Digital Marketing companies like Design the Planet offer professional website development, but also offer a range of website maintenance packages to match the type and size of your business.
Have a website already? Digital Agencies, like Design the Planet, can help keep your site up to date and top-performing even if they didn’t build it initially. They should be familiar with the maintenance needs of sites built on WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, and more. Outsourcing website maintenance allows you to focus on running your business while leaving your web maintenance needs to the experts. Or, on the other hand, if you are capable of performing web maintenance and do not require outside help, then DIY. Either way, maintaining your website is crucial.
Prioritizing Website Maintenance for Long-Term Success
For those who may not have the time or expertise to handle website maintenance themselves, there are professional services available. Third-party website maintenance service providers offer comprehensive support in areas such as site backups, updates, security checks, performance optimization, SEO and content management.
