What is Website Maintenance?

 

Every website needs maintenance. If you do not maintain your website it will be out of order just like a car. A car needs servicing from time to time and so does a website. Website maintenance is the task of keeping your website up-to-date and its performance flawless. Website maintenance is not a one-time task. It has to be done regularly to make the website more productive. 

Your website exhibits the face of your business. The online presence of your website is represented by your website. The details of your company, the testimonials, the products, and the contact information are all there and people come looking for them. You can lose leads and sales if you have a dysfunctional website. Your first impression of your customers will go very wrong which is not beneficial for your business especially if it is an ecommerce website because people cannot make transactions with a defective website.

Get the brief idea on website maintenance service

The interval between the backups is totally up to you but ideally, website maintenance service providers should keep weekly or monthly backups. These are the general steps that everyone should follow for website maintenance. Apart from all this, anything that is outdated on your website should be updated to optimize the performance.

A lot of money, time, and energy are invested in building a website. All of it will become useless if the website is not maintained properly and starts malfunctioning. A regularly maintained website can provide advantages like SEO boost, traffic growth, and better ranking in search engines. It is equally necessary for both large and small-scale businesses to maintain their websites. Many companies, mostly startups, avoid it just to save money, which costs them, even more, when their websites break down because they need to build their websites from scratch.

It does not show on the surface but with regular monitoring of your website, you will know what kind of maintenance it needs and when. Website maintenance also includes security updates and new content that can help you retain your old customers and grab the attention of new customers. Any website that has grammatical errors, technical glitches, or unwelcoming background and graphics will not give a good user experience. With website maintenance you can get rid of these. Websites with malware and bugs are not appreciated by Google which is why it takes them down.

You will get to know more about website maintenance, its requirement, and what it does to your website as you read this blog further. You can also visit our website to get free content every week on website maintenance and services. The ideas you gather will help you understand your website better. The price for the services can also be found there.

Why is Website Maintenance Important?

•                    The Majority of Customers Conduct Online Search: Nowadays everyone searches for everything online. 87% of people conduct online research before buying a product. That is a huge number and an equally great opportunity for you to be found out by people and to leave an impression on them. While searching for products or services related to your business and finding your website, their experience with your website should be good. If your website does not attract the attention of your visitors then they will go to your competitors’ website and you will lose valuable leads. So your online presence is the backbone of your business growth.

•                    Your Website is the First Impression on Your Customers: Your website shows how professional you are. The visitors that come to your website can be potential customers if their experience with your website is impressive. If that goes wrong they will not visit your website again. They will rather do business with someone else with a professional website. The perfection of your website tells how seriously you take your business. Customers may lose interest in your website due to grammatical or typing errors and irrelevant content. It is necessary to keep the interest of your customers in mind. Website maintenance comes with security and software updates that increase the speed of your website and provide new features that can lure customers to your website.

•                    The Sales Growth Depends on Your Website: Your website takes the charge of directing your visitors to purchase your products and services. This ensures that your sales grow. For an ecommerce website, the transactions are an important part. If your website does not function properly the transactions will be unsuccessful and you will lose valuable customers. If you want to do serious business you must have a well-functioning website.

•                    Visitors Judge the User Experience: 89% of customers prefer to do business with your competitors due to the bad user experience of your website. The better the user experience of your website the more customers you can retain. The sales of your business depend on the user experience. People will be willing to do business with you when the user experience of your website is impressive. If it takes more than a few seconds to load your website then the visitors will not stay and the bounce rate will increase.

•                    Improved Security is a Part of Website Maintenance Plan: Bugs, hackers, and cyber-attacks can cost you a fortune if you do not get rid of them in time. They are threats to the security of your website. They can sometimes crash your whole website and you will have to build the website again. The investment you would have made to build the website will all be futile. Around $15.4 million are spent by U.S. companies per year to tackle cyber-attacks. There is a lot of sensitive information about your customers on your website that should remain private. If your website is not secure that information will also be jeopardized. You will end up losing the trust of your customers and your website may face downtime.

•                    Website Maintenance Supports Your SEO Strategy: The bounce rate of your website should be low for it to have a good ranking in the search engines. If the customers leave your website within a few seconds of arriving then the bounce rate will increase which will be bad for your Google ranking. The traffic to your website will decrease eventually. The other defects that hamper your search engine rankings are outdated website design, structure, or content, security or technical issues, etc. Your website must always appear updated because an outdated website cannot rank well in search engines.

Steps for Website Maintenance

Website maintenance is a detailed process and involves many steps. All of these steps are important if you want to get results and should not be skipped. However, you should see whether these steps are relevant to the kind of website you have or not. The steps are as follows:

1. Detailed Review of the Whole Website

Go through all the pages of your website to see whether there are any errors. These errors can be dysfunctional features, broken links, slow load time, outdated content, absence of meta tags or content descriptions, grammatical or typographical errors, bad user experience, erratic formatting, etc. This step should be followed annually and after every update.

2. Security Update

This is one of the major steps to keep your website secure. Your hosting provider and web developer should make sure to install security patches, bug fixes, and upgrades as soon as they are released, otherwise, your website will be vulnerable to malware attacks. These updates also influence the CMS, operating system, database, and webserver. The updates should generally be done every month or when they are available.

3. The Functionality of the Forms

Call to action forms and check-out process of any website must be functional all the time. These forms are business opportunities that get hampered if the forms do not work properly. After every update, you should check whether the forms are working properly or not. For regular website maintenance, it should be checked quarterly.

4. Domain Name Renewal

If the domain name of your website expires it will be given to someone else. Losing your domain name will be a great loss which is why you should renew your domain name on time and every year.

5. Report Analysis

You must keep an eye on the general website analytics, its performance in the search engines, and the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to analyze the potential of your website. This way you will be able to know what is dragging your website down and fix it. This report will also make your plans more effective.

6. Browser Compatibility Assessment

As everything is going digital you never know which browser a person will use to search you. It will be good for your website if it is compatible with popular browsers and their different versions like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, etc. Your website should keep up with the latest technologies and you should check its compatibility at regular intervals.

7. Website Backup

Keeping a backup of your entire website can be handy for your website if anything goes wrong. You should also keep a backup of your website in a remote location before it installs any update so that data can be retrieved in case of any failure. Regularly backup your website and you can recover the latest version of your website.