The importance of Website Maintenance

To understand why website maintenance is so important, consider the regular maintenance needed in your home.

You need to maintain your home whether it’s cleaning, fixing broken tiles, painting the walls, mowing the lawns, or cleaning the gutters.

When you have plumbing issues, you call a plumber. If the air conditioner isn’t working, you call an air conditioning repair company.

Regular maintenance is an essential part of home ownership. The same applies to owning a business and operating a website.

As a business owner, your business needs to be maintained. If your website is an important part of your business, it’s crucial that your website is kept running well.

Whilst I teach all my clients how to edit their web pages, handing over the job to someone else allows you to focus on your business rather than editing web pages. Sometimes things may go wrong with your website, there may be bug fixes that need sorting out and that may not be something you understand. If your website crashes, that’s a very stressful moment if you don’t know how to fix the problem yourself.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) will boost website traffic and increase returns but there is work that needs to be done and your website adjusted based on the services, specials, etc., that you offer.

While running the business itself is important, how people reach your website and what they see is what will drive revenue. 

Your business website is the first impression that many customers will get. Your website is your image. If your image is poorly maintained, how do you expect to generate traffic, increase revenue, and retain a solid customer base?

Knowing the importance of your business image and regular website maintenance will help keep you in line with the competition within your industry. In this article, we will look at what website maintenance is, what it does for your business and the ways you can keep your business website up to date.  

What is Website Maintenance?

Website maintenance refers to any and all of the tasks that are crucial to keeping your website functioning properly and ensuring that it is up to date.

It is an ongoing process that checks your site for issues, makes updates to plugins and content, and much more. It can seem like a full-time job keeping your site up to date, and it often is!

I have been a web developer for many years and part of my job is honing my craft with best practices and ongoing education to stay on top of the ever-changing WordPress.org ecosystem.

Top 3 Benefits of Website Maintenance

Maintaining Your Security

One of the primary concerns for any website owner, especially with online traffic growth, is how to keep the website secure.

How do you protect your website from hackers?

Is there a security plan in place to recover lost data if a security breach does occur? When your website lacks stability in the cybersecurity side of things, your visitors won’t feel comfortable clicking ahead to see what your business offers. 

WordPress has constant updates that occur to fix bugs and patch software but most importantly, to make sure that all software is secure and there are no vulnerabilities in the code.

Why is maintaining security important?

If you don’t keep up with routine website maintenance and updates, you will be running on outdated security and opening the door for hackers to get in.

This not only risks your business’ data and finances, but it may affect your clients.

Maintaining Your Site Traffic

To increase revenue, you need to bring in more customers whilst also keeping your appeal to your existing customer base.

You need a strong web presence and boosting site traffic will give business returns that you likely wouldn’t see otherwise. 

Why is maintaining site traffic important?

When you update your website regularly, the website may rank higher on search engines such as Google.

When your site ranks higher, it will be more visible to people searching for your products and services. This is where using SEO keywords comes into play but that’s a topic for another day.

Refreshing your content, excluding excess/duplicate information, fixing errors, and adding new valuable information, the more likely people will be to click ahead and see what your business is all about. 

Maintaining Your Visitor Experience

Put yourself in your website visitor’s shoes when looking at the design and function of your business website.

If you’re looking for a particular product or service you want to be able to find what you need in the least amount of time possible.

You want a website that is easy to use, this is where UI/UX comes into play.

Also, nobody wants to search around a slow website where you waste time waiting for pages to load whilst trying to find what you are looking for.

You want to show your clients that you care for your business and provide them with a great website that is easy to use and fast loading.

Why is maintaining the visitor experience important?

Engaging your audience with regular updates, including blog posts, images, business updates, events, and more, will enhance the visitor experience and help promote your brand in a way that others in your industry may not be doing. 

By making sure your website is looking and working at its best, potential clients will see you as a professional business that takes pride and care in its brand and business.

Providing existing and potential customers with the best experience possible when visiting your website will increase site traffic and, in turn, revenue. 

Need Website Maintenance Help?

I offer maintenance and care plans for all sites that I build and I can create custom care plans for sites that I didn’t build too.

If you want an update but no ongoing maintenance a WordPress VIP Intensive could be enough for me to get your site upgraded to current best practices.

With a Website in 1 day, I will show you how you can do some web maintenance on your own but without a maintenance plan, I cannot help if you have an issue down the track.

I hope you found this blog on website maintenance enlightening

Until next time