You perform maintenance on your car to ensure it’s operating properly. Physical exercise keeps the body in shape. When it comes to websites, the same principle applies. You know how it’s important to have a well-structured wesbite. But having your site up and running isn’t enough. You also need to regularly maintain and update your website to ensure it’s always running at full capacity.
As the foundation of your online presence, your website is the first place your visitors will learn about your business and products. Up to 94 percent of first impressions that your website make are related to web design. If your website ins’t functional or up to date, you may end up losing a significant number of leads and sales. Regular website maintenance helps to prevent this. In this post, you’ll learn why website maintenance is essential for your business. But first…
What is Website Maintenance?
Website maintenance refers to activities intended to keep your website up to date and running optimally. It includes regular website audits to identify issues, correcting the issues, and updating your design and web content. The goal of website maintenance is to ensure that it stays updated and relevant so you can be able to engage and retain your visitors.
Website maintenance includes:
- Troubleshooting issues that can result in a potential loss of clients
- Updating your site’s security credentials
- Updating your plugins and integrations
- Making changes to your website such as adding a new line of products and contact information
- Keeping up with web development best practices
Why Does Website Maintenance Matter?
Many businesses understand the importance of a website. But they forget about the website as soon as they create and launch it, entirely ignoring its maintenance. Here are a few reasons why you should ensure that your website is regularly maintained and updated:
Maintenance improves your site security
Website security is one of the main reasons why maintenance is crucial for your business. Without maintenance, your website would be vulnerable to attacks and hacking incidences. Nobody wants to visit a website where their private information is at the risk of getting into the wrong hands, especially if it’s an eCommerce website. If you use content management systems (CMS) such as Drupal and WordPress on your website, you should ensure that it’s updated with the latest security updates and software patches.
Most consumers start their search for products online
The majority of consumers conduct online research before making a purchase. According to Retail Dive, 87 per cent of buyers start their search for products online. These people are likely to end up on your website. If you have a poorly maintained website that gives a negative impression of your business, they’ll leave and instead shop from your competitors. You don’t want to be missing out on leads and sales this easily.
It boosts organic traffic to your website
Search engines such as Google always strive to provide their users with the best quality content. Websites that are well-maintained and updated, therefore, rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs). You know what a higher ranking means for your website. Increased online visibility and organic traffic as well. Besides providing valuable and relevant information, you should also ensure that broken links are fixed and duplicate pages removed.
It optimizes your visitors’ experience
It’s important to keep your website regularly updated with shareable content such as image galleries, upcoming events, and authoritative blog content. Besides giving your visitors an idea about your business and products, it also provides them with value and keeps them engaged. Maintaining your website massively improves the user experience. A well-maintained website is a key to promoting your brand and products.
Website maintenance supports your SEO strategy
The last thing you want on your website is your visitors leaving as soon as they arrive. A high bounce rate is a signal to search engines that your website isn’t relevant enough. It lowers your search engine rankings and ultimately results in less organic less traffic to your site. Don’t let persistent security and technical issues, ineffective web design and structure, and outdated content diminish your search engine rankings.
Avoid losing essential data and files
Website maintenance provides you with an opportunity to back up all your website’s important files and data. You don’t want to lose all your important information in case the website goes down due to a natural disaster or malware attack. Backing up your data also makes it easier to migrate to new platforms. If you have a simple website, then monthly backups are sufficient to keep your data safe. But dynamic websites such as an eCommerce website require more frequent backing up.
Avoid damaging the integrity of your website
The longer you wait to perform maintenance on your website, the higher the risk of encountering a problem. Regular updates and maintenance reduce the likelihood of problems occurring. Considering that you’ll be forced to update your website at some point, why wait until it’s inevitable? Even problems that you consider minor could damage the integrity of your website and have a long-lasting impact.
Improve your website speed
CMS platforms such as WordPress constantly release new updates. Each new release comes with performance improvements intended to increase the efficiency of your website. How many people would be willing to stay on a website that takes too long to load? According to a study by Google, a delay of between 1 and 3 seconds in loading could increase your bounce rate by 32 per cent. The longer the loading speed, the higher the probability of a bounce rate. This is a simple problem that can be solved with regular updates.
There are a lot of other reasons why you should regularly perform website maintenance. These include building brand awareness, trust, and loyalty, reducing wastage of resources by taking care of issues before they escalate, removing unusable website features, and ensuring that your website is scalable for future business growth.
But how much does it cost to update your website? Cost is a very important consideration when it comes to website maintenance, especially small and medium enterprises (SMES) that don’t have deep pockets. Website maintenance costs often vary depending on a number of factors such as:
- The type of website you have
- The design of the website
- Domain name renewal
- Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates
- Website hosting costs
- Copywriting and SEO
If you’re a small business, you can apply for a website grant for upgrading your website.
Website maintenance is crucial for your business regardless of whether you’re a small business or an established enterprise. It should be among your top priorities. When you partner with Salt Marketing for your website maintenance needs, some of the services you’ll enjoy include regular website and content updates, website repair, website host migration, SEO, and regular CMS updates. Regardless of the cost of website maintenance, the return on investment is massive and worth it.
We Are Here To Help…
Our website maintenance experts have helped thousands of businesses like yourself and we would love to show you how Salt Marketing could skyrocket your website performance and engagement with our top-notch services. Click below for a free consultation with our experts.
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