Creating a website that looks great and functions well is important for any industry, but that’s only half the battle—the upkeep is just as crucial. Your website maintenance ensures that your business, blog or online presence continues to evolve and succeed over time. This also establishes that anyone who interacts with your site will always have the best user experience.
While there are a number of tasks to consider when maintaining your website, organizing each one by week, month, quarter and year can help you build a foolproof plan, leaving nothing unchecked and unnoticed. To help you get started, we’ve put together this complete guide on website maintenance, why it’s important and how much it costs.
What is website maintenance?
Website maintenance is the practice of monitoring your website’s overall health and performance. Keeping a website up-to-date is crucial to ensuring it's working at full capacity, engaging and retaining site visitors.
There are a number of tasks required to properly check and maintain a website, including updating security software and plugins, adding fresh content, increasing new and returning traffic, and meeting the satisfaction of your site users. While some of these points are more time-sensitive than others, each one will be addressed extensively further in the post.
Why is website maintenance important?
Website maintenance can impact your business’s first impressions, SEO strategy, security and sales. Whether you’re a business owner or creating a blog, you’ll want to make sure that when people and search engines land on your site, they will immediately see the benefits of your site’s offerings — or risk losing them. This means that your ability to rein in and retain online interest lies primarily in your website maintenance.
Having said that, if you go too long without regular website maintenance, your site could suffer in the process. Your website will begin to run slow, stop converting leads, potentially house malware and get hacked, thereby causing problems for those who click on it. It could even stop working altogether.
Let’s dive deeper into the benefits of website maintenance:
01. First impressions
Just as the saying goes, “You only have one chance to make a first impression,” businesses online can make or break a deal depending on the initial look and feel of their website. If yours looks old or isn’t working as it should, you may potentially lose out on capturing new leads within the first few seconds that matter.
Research shows that first impressions are 94% design related. Using attractive and up-to-date web design can help you convey the right message to new site visitors. It reassures them that they've found what they’re looking for and reinforces your site’s relevancy, credibility, trustworthiness and uniqueness. As a result, searchers will find it in their interest to stay on your web page.
02. Business reputation
Along the same line as first impressions, your business reputation is extremely important in gaining customers’ trust. Some ways to uphold your online standing include having working links, adding a 404 page for broken ones, updating plugins, freshening up content and abiding to a recommended page load time of under two seconds are just ways to uphold your reputation online. You’ve got to make sure your website delivers on your company promise of quality, reliability and professionalism.
03. SEO strategy
Paying attention to website maintenance is essential for your site’s SEO strategy. Consider this an opportunity to establish a routine process of monitoring and improving your website’s SEO, ranging from updating content to fixing broken site links.
These bits of information are what a Googlebot looks out for when it crawls your website. In this initial stage of analysis, Google is determining the value of your website, potentially affecting your ability to rank first page or not down the line. Ranking positively on search engines can help drive traffic to your website, bringing customers to your business. That said, ranking poorly will make it harder for people to find you online.
04. Sales
Sales are the lifeline of any online store. More people purchasing from your ecommerce site translates to a healthy and functioning business. To ensure keeping sales figures high, you’ll want to keep certain technical glitches at bay which could deter your customer’s shopping experience. Some common ecommerce site problems include bugs in product ordering, check out and payment processes, or failed discounts and free shipping due to an error.
Furthermore, people shopping online rely on quality images and the ability to zoom in on a product that they otherwise would have tested at a store. It’s especially important that you offer professional images, videos or other visual support to cover any gaps that come with not being able to physically try on clothes or shoes. Along with seeing images, customers also want to get as much information as possible about their potential purchase, so you’ll want to invest time in writing product descriptions that can attest to your business reputation.
Inspirational Sales Video Must Watch by Grant Cardone
05. Security
A website maintenance plan helps protect your business from virtual threats. Regularly updating your security software and renewing your SSL certification provider help safeguard your site’s files. These are made up of sensitive information, such as passwords and customers’ private data — credit card numbers and banking details.
Developers who release these website updates are doing so to patch vulnerabilities they might have found. When you maintain your site’s security, it becomes harder for hackers to compromise your business and easier for customers to entrust their monetary assets to you.
Website maintenance tasks
Now that you know what to look out for when monitoring website maintenance for your business, you’ll need a plan for each task based on how often they need to be updated:
Weekly website maintenance tasks:
With Google Analytics you gain access to information about how people are reaching your website and using it. You can do weekly website maintenance checks by logging in to your Google Analytics account to track traffic, thereby understanding your site’s performance and identifying areas of improvement.
Traffic-driven data, such as number of site visitors and bounce rate, can lead to making better decisions for your business. Additionally, this analytics tool lets you know where the traffic comes from, by geographical location, keywords and intent, and interest.
Monthly website maintenance tasks:
Check that all your online platforms are secured, plugins are updated, and your website content is backed up. This will help you avoid losing any valuable information and fortify your site against cyberattacks.
You should also test your website speed with Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool that offers detail about your site working on different browsers and devices. After analyzing your website, it will then generate suggestions for making your webpage faster.
Quarterly website maintenance tasks:
Review your website content based on defined goals and metrics, such as SEO (organic traffic and backlinks), user behavior (page views and bounce rate), engagement (likes, mentions and shares) and sales (conversation rates and ROI).
Some questions to ask yourself during this stage are, “Are all my meta titles and descriptions as SEO effective as possible?” “Is this blog post getting relevant traffic?” and “What can be updated in my content, topic-wise and linking-wise?” These are linked to performance. Then, proceed by tweaking your content, testing out calls-to-action across your pages and seeing whether your site’s content, both visual and textual, displays correctly on all types of browsers and devices.
Annual website maintenance tasks:
It’s that time of the year to go over renewal dates for your domain name, hosting service and any additional tools you use for website maintenance, like paid Analytics and keyword research tools.
Your site’s header, footer and legal policy might also require special attention by this point. Make sure all your information is up-to-date, and that main menu categories reflect what’s most relevant to your business. Look out for old logos and company images that may not serve your best interest anymore. After a period of time, a website redesign could benefit your site greatly.
How much does website maintenance cost?
Website Updates are $50 Per Hour
Or Try our monthly plan at $250 monthly. Cancel anytime with NO contractual obligation!
