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A great business website is not a one-off thing. You can’t just pour all your effort and resources into creating it once and hoping that it will perform at a high level continuously even if you don’t maintain it on a regular basis. In order to ensure that your website is doing its job when it comes to marketing your business, you need to perform regular website maintenance.
What is Website Maintenance?
Website maintenance is the process of regularly performing checks on your websites to monitor its performance, as well as making sure that the content is kept relevant and updated. Another key process of website maintenance is looking for any bugs in the website’s features and functionality. The main goal of website maintenance is to make sure that your website is healthy, performing properly, and there are continuous traffic and growth. It also ensures that your Google rankings are kept high.
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Whether you have a small business or a large enterprise, keeping your website well-maintained is critical to ensuring that your business is healthy so that you can retain old customers as well as acquire new ones. While smaller businesses might get away with cutting a few corners here and there, this still does not mean that these companies can survive for long without proper website maintenance.
How Do I Conduct Proper Website Maintenance?
There is a list of tasks that you should perform on a regular basis in order to perform website maintenance properly. You can break these down into four time periods: weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly.
Necessary Weekly Tasks:
- Backup and Update
- Check for Broken Links or Loading Errors
- Checking your Key Metric Performance
Necessary Monthly Tasks:
- Update Content
- Check loading speed
- Review security protocols
Necessary Quarterly Tasks
- Review and update website design and images
- Check SEO metrics
- Run some test purchases
- Test website on all possible browsers
- Review and update advertising and marketing campaigns
Necessary Yearly Tasks
- Renew the domain name
- Perform a thorough user utility test
Is Website Maintenance Really Important?
As you can see above, website maintenance is a process that grows on itself so you want to make sure that you always do each step properly to prevent future problems. Luckily for you, there are new tools that come out every year that allows you to perform website maintenance properly. However, you do need to invest the time and effort into learning how to use these tools correctly and efficiently achieve the results that you want.
Speaking of which, what results do you want to achieve?
High-ranking SEO results
Any website’s goal is to achieve a high Google ranking by using the latest SEO techniques. If you use the right SEO methods to increase your website’s ranking, Google will feature your website on the top of any related search inquiries. In a nutshell, Google rewards websites with updated and relevant information with high results and penalizes outdated or security-risk websites with lower search results. Your website might even get de-indexed if it falls to a low enough ranking!
Regular Customer Attraction and Engagement
Once your website has gained traction and is regularly receiving customer traffic, it’s now important to maintain the website in order to keep the current customers and attract new ones.
Updated Security
This is arguably the most important reason to perform website maintenance, especially if you are running an e-commerce store. Since you will be handling sensitive information such as bank account and credit card numbers, you want to guarantee that your customers will remain safe from online threats such as data breaches and hacking.
Strong Business Brand and Image
If you invest in regular website maintenance, you will show your customers that you care about having a professional image. Customers often think websites that have a clean and professional design is likely to provide a better service.
How Much Will It Cost Me, or Can I Do it Myself?
Now, the most important question: how much will website maintenance services cost me? It’s actually quite easy to calculate the actual cost of website maintenance services, but it’s not only a matter of whether or not you can afford the money. The more important question here is whether you can afford to perform website maintenance tasks by yourself.
What does that mean?
Well, think of it this way: if you have a leaky pipe at home, you might be thinking of fixing it yourself. If you have the proper tools and experience, you might want to fix the problem to save the cost of hiring a professional. However, if the problem is too complicated, you might be causing more damage by trying to fix it yourself!
This is the same idea that you should apply when thinking of performing website maintenance yourself. If you have the experience and tools, you can perform website maintenance tasks yourself. However, if you don’t have experience in the latest SEO techniques, online security protocols, or updated website design trends, you should consider hiring a professional to do these tasks for you.
