9 Reasons why routine website maintenance is necessary whether you are a small business, big business or organisation. A website is not unlike a motor vehicle – it needs fuel and maintenance to keep running.
More people and businesses are using the internet to search for information, therefore your website needs to be working and providing up to date content to market your business products and services.
Your website is the window to your business. If its not working efficiently it is a reflection of the professional standards within your business.
There is nothing permanent except change
Heraclitus
Here are the 9 Reasons why Routine Website Maintenance is Necessary…
The digital world is rapidly growing and innovating with new methods and information. If you do not maintain and upgrade your website it will eventually stop!
1. Ever Changing Technology.
The digital world is rapidly growing, changing and innovating with new faster technology and systems. If you do not maintain and upgrade your website to take on-board these changes your website will slow and eventually crash.
Mobiles are now dominating with over 70% of all searches being done on mobile devices. Your website must be mobile friendly.
Updates to your website structure keeps it running smoothly and effectively creating a user friendly experience.
2. Security of your Website and your Visitors.
Hackers are ever increasing their activity on the internet.
Protect your website via its back office with strong logins and by changing passwords on a regular basis. If you are on WordPress, consider installing Wordfence and similar security plugins to minimize the risk of getting unwanted guests in your admin control panel.
To prevent the uploading of malware and the like on both you and your customers computers best maintain the latest website platform upgrades to assist in making it inaccessible to hackers. Avoid at all costs downloading any cracked or nulled themes/scripts as they are probably injected with malware that will sooner or later, format your whole hosting server. (And that’s the best case scenario)
3. Customer Experience.
The speed of website load times is critical to visitor numbers. You should be targeting load times of under 3 seconds.
Better the site be clean, uncluttered and easy on the eye.
Navigation around your website needs to be easy to find and working correctly.
Your website is the public perception of your business image. Be professional maintaining and eliminating errors, outdated information, broken links and poor grammar or spelling mistakes.
- Become the go to website for information in the eyes of Google and the public within your niche.
- Adding new and valuable content on a regular basis as its the fuel to increase visits.
- Regularly add or change the websites layout, images and links.
- Update content in your pages and blogs when it becomes out of date or irrelevant.
- An e-commerce store needs regular changes to keep it fresh and maintain regular visits by past customers.
- Make use of links to the social media that suits your line of business
5. Provide a Reason to Return.
Provide visitors with a reason to return to your website with relevant content to keywords used in a visitor search. The use of categories, tags and the search box will assist in your website navigation.
Generate regular valuable quality content about your niche so that you become the authority that people and search engines trust.
6. Answer Requests or Comments.
Most websites have a reply, requests or comments section. Do not ignore these but answer them as they could lead to a sale and customer.
In the website I build I use plugins to filter or eliminate spam but this needs monitoring by you.
7. Improve SEO Ranking.
Search engines love active website that add new content. Active sites increase SEO rankings…
- Visitors will not wait. Website loading speeds of under 2 to 3 seconds is one of the main reasons to avoid losing customers.
- The regular cleaning of the cache, speeds up loading speeds. Normally some wordpress caching plugins automatically clean their caches, but some don’t.
- Active websites regularly add to their valuable content with blogs to attract more visitors.
- Google ranks those who maintain their website with the latest technology updates, relevant information and links. A deserted blog that does not get updated often, will end up being worthless and full of expired content that is no longer valid.
8. Ensure your Website is Working Well.
Routinely check your website to see that it is fully operational and loads information as you would expect to ensure visitors have a great experience. If not, have the issues attended to by hiring a good web developer from Upwork or any similar platform.
9. Lack of Time.
If you do not have the time or knowledge to keep your website up to date it is better to get someone else than not do it at all
Concluding the 9 Reasons Why Routine Website Maintenance is Necessary
More and more people and businesses are using the internet to search for information, therefore your website needs to be working and providing up to date content to market your business products and services.
