Why Website Maintenance is Key to a Successful Website
Websites require maintenance to keeping them working properly. Avoiding website maintenance is like not having regular oil changes on your vehicle. You wouldn’t be able to drive your car very long and eventually it would sputter and die. Well, the same process is true for your website. Your website should always be live, ready for customers and presenting your business at its finest. It’s embarrassing when customers try to learn more about you – and even buy from you – and see a broken site. They ask themselves, should I do business with this company? Are they real? How would they treat me if they can’t even take care of their website?
Websites Are Not a “Set and Forget”
If you don’t have website maintenance carried out monthly, you may be throwing money out the window. When visitors go to a website and find things wrong with it, they don’t stick around. If you are like many website owners, you probably don’t check your site to see how it functions. Missed website issues or downtime can lose you potential customers.
The Benefits of Maintenance
Many people don’t realize the benefits of site maintenance:
The website performance, it’s load time, downtime and uptime, is all dependent on the website’s core code and plugins. Hackers are constantly looking for vulnerabilities which is why your WordPress software and plugins should always be on the most recent version.
In addition, maintaining a site and adding fresh content and new design elements are important to organic growth and business growth which won’t happen unless you have someone making regular updates. Each time something get’s upgraded or fixed, it could break something else which is why it is crucial to QA the site for errors on a regular basis.
Best Practices for Managing Web Maintenance
At Web SEO and Design we take great care to first backup the website, and check the website after each of our updates for any issues. Our software keeps a record of plugins we update, so if there is ever an issue, we can see what plugin version was changed and revert back. Also, included in our monthly maintenance report are the performance and security scans. If in the event we ever catch a plugin issue, it becomes a support ticket and we address it before you ever know there’s a problem.
Dangers of Do It Yourself Maintenance
Maintaining your site yourself could cost you more than you may think. I constantly get calls from folks who tried to update their site themselves and now the site is broken. When asked, what has changed? The answer is always, “I didn’t do anything.” That means we need to dive in to try and figure out what broke. Many times, the fix is quick and easy. The issue is that it can take hours to identify the issue without any records.
If you just update from your WordPress admin, you wouldn’t have a record of what was done. If an update to a plugin created an issue a couple weeks after you made the change, it is difficult to know what changed and how you should revert back without restoring a very old backup. You would also lose any and all content changes, sales orders, customer information, etc. that were made/added to the site after the date of that very old backup.
It Costs More to Fix Than to Maintain
Inexperience and neglect can damage the look and functionality of your website. When that happens, you have a choice to make. One, you try and fix it yourself, in which case you may do further damage. Or two, you can then pay the (sometimes hefty) price for someone experienced to fix it. Just like your car, it costs more to fix it than it does to maintain it properly. Regular oil changes help keep your car running properly, regular site maintenance helps keeps your web site running properly.
Call in a Professional
Why not deal with what you know best and let us deal with what we know best? Would you try to fight that court battle without a lawyer? Would you try to fix your teeth without a dentist? Then why try to maintain your own website if you’re not a web professional? By securing an experienced web professional to update and maintain your site properly you are actually saving potential lost sales and visitors.
If you’re interested in securing a maintenance contract for your web site, contact us to learn how we can keep your site in proper working order. We have several Website Care Plans to choose from