Just having a website up and running is not enough to achieve your business goals and needs. One of the most often overlooked, yet one of the most important factors of having a successful online marketing strategy is ongoing website maintenance. This includes web design, regular content updates, security check, website backup and regular updates of your CMS and plugins to prevent security vulnerabilities. All of these can be complicated and time-consuming and if you don’t have a monthly plan in place, you will not be able to get the results that you wanted from your website. That’s the reason a set and forget website will simply not work if you are looking for a long term growth and success of your business.
Properly maintaining your site helps to ensure that your website is accessible 24/7 and visitors can get the information that they need, which can result to an increased number of returning traffic, new potential customers and more revenue.
Your website is the face of your business online and you want to give your visitors a good impression by having a professional-looking website that is up to date in terms of design and technology. You should also enable automatic updates of your CMS to ensure it gets updated when a new version has been released by the developers. Same thing with your website plugins to remain compatible with your CMS and fix any bugs discovered during previous versions. This ensures better website performance and protects your site against potential threats as hackers tend to attack from known vulnerabilities of outdated plugins and CMS.
Your website market your business online and does it 24/7/365. You must have a fast and reliable web hosting service provider that can guarantee 99.9% uptime and can handle website traffic spikes. Website downtime even just for a few seconds ruins your marketing efforts, especially if you run Facebook/Google ads resulting in loss of revenue and can also affect your brand loyalty negatively.
You’re probably wondering why your website has a very low conversion rate. Have you tried navigating using different devices? Is it mobile responsive? Can you easily find the information that you need? How easy it is to send a message or complete a check out process? All of these affect your conversion rate. When updating your website design, you should also focus on overall user experience as this can drastically improve your conversion rate. You want to have a responsive website that loads blazingly fast and creates a frictionless experience for your visitors. This will not just boost your conversion but will also help reduce the bounce rate in your website traffic.
Every website can be a target for hackers. One of the most important things you must do to keep your website safe is to perform regular backups. If your site has been compromised or accidentally broke because of a plugin or core update, you can easily restore your website from a previous clean state using the data that you have created in just a few minutes. This will minimize the damage dealt with your business as you will not have to rebuild your website entirely from scratch. It’s also recommended that you install an additional web application firewall to give your site an extra layer of security by identifying and blocking malicious traffic in real-time.
Website maintenance isn’t only about technology. Your content says a lot about your business. Prospects who heard about your business will look for it online to see whether the people behind this website are making an effort. When visitors go to websites and find things wrong or outdated, they’ll leave right away. This will give your business a poor first impression and most probably they will never visit again.
That’s the reason you need to keep your website updated with your latest offers, company events, new products or services, etc. so that your prospects will know that your company can stay on top of things and you’re the one they can trust and do business with.
You also want to have all the important details checked such as contact numbers, email addresses, social media buttons, and all the internal and external links are working to serve your customers better.
By routinely updating all outdated content and adding new ones. You will be able to provide more value to your visitors. In fact, search engines love fresh content! Search engine crawlers will visit your site more often if they have found out that you are pouring a lot of valuable content on your website. It will help your website rank higher on search engines as it will increase the topical relevance score of your website by regularly adding related topics.
As a business owner, you already have too much on your plate to worry about website maintenance. However, you can’t just ignore it as all your time, money and efforts building a website and marketing will go to waste. Why not just focus on what you do best and let an expert handle your website maintenance. By hiring an experienced web developer who can manage and update your site correctly, you will likely save thousands of dollars rather than doing it yourself. A simple core or plugin update can break your website and if you don’t know what changes caused the problem and don’t know how to revert it to its previous state, then your website will have extended downtime which means you are losing new business during this period.