Last Updated on 1 year by Komolafe Bamidele
When hiring digital marketing agencies, average business owners expect them to do four major things:
develop their site, manage its content, administer user configuration, and expand brand reach.
However, some fail to realize the importance of website maintenance and the need to draft a long-term site maintenance plan.
Like your car and home gadgets, your website requires regular maintenance for optimum functionality.
It doesn’t matter whether you are using Drupal, WordPress or other open-source CMS,
failing to prioritize website maintenance would make it vulnerable to security breaches and other issues.
If you need good reasons to prioritize your website maintenance, we have provided a few below.
But, before we dive straight into that, let’s beat around the bush a bit.
What is Website Maintenance?
If you are a business owner with an online presence, the chances are that you are familiar with the term website maintenance.
However, if you aren’t, or perhaps, your knowledge on the topic is shallow, here is a terse definition to help you out.
Website maintenance can be likened to maintaining your car or electronic gadget.
In essence, it involves tasks tailored to keep your website functioning properly and up to date.
Website maintenance can mean inspecting your website for problems, fixing any issues, and initiating updates.
What Does Website Maintenance Include?
Now that you know what website maintenance entails, you may want to figure out what it includes.
When a digital marketer offers or recommends that you maintain your website, what is he talking about?
Basically, website maintenance includes an array of tasks, such as:
Carrying out annual tests on your website to discover hidden or conspicuous faults.
Testing your browser compatibility. Testing your forms and checkout process quarterly.
Checking for software updates regularly. Renew key metrics weekly. Next, let’s look at why you should prioritize your website maintenance.
Below are the reasons why websites must maintain their sites.
1. Getting Website Hacked
An average of 30,000 new websites is hacked daily. What does this mean? It means the chances of your website being hacked are high, and it increases when you fail to prioritize website maintenance.
Website hackers are a ruthless bunch of cybercriminals who wouldn’t spare your website even if it were small.
If they notice anything that catches their eye, they’ll surely pull out all the stops to ensure that they steal it.
One of the best ways to prevent this from happening is by running regular security checks on your website to determine vulnerabilities.
These checks can only be conducted if you have a site maintenance plan in place.
Remember, hackers hack small sites, but they are more eager to target older sites due to their vulnerability.
That said, if you own such a site, don’t hesitate to beef up its security to forestall a breach.
2. Risk of Damage to the Integrity of Your Site.
If you want to protect your website, you’ll have to be proactive. Don’t wait for your site to crash before updating it.
Neither should you fold your hands and anticipate a security breach before you beef up its firewalls. Doing so will only worsen the case when the breach or crash eventually occurs.
If you notice any small issue with your site or the need to update it arises, don’t hesitate to take action.
The more you update your site, the less likely a problem will arise. Furthermore, skipping updates (like 2.0 to 6.0) might seem like a brilliant idea to you.
However, doing so isn’t recommended as someday you’ll be forced into the new updates.
And when that day eventually comes, your risk will be bigger as other modules will be out of date.
3. Website Maintenance is Good for your SEO Strategy.
Failing to conduct regular maintenance on your site could leave it prone to several issues.
When these issues arise, you might notice a drop in visitor influx. A rapid drop in your website visitors or traffic could make Google deem your site irrelevant.
The result? Increased bounce rate, which can result in lower rankings in search results of your Charlotte business website.
Incessant technical problems, security problems, including old website design, layout, or even content, can drive your search engine rankings downwards.
Of course, to prevent this, you should contact a Charlotte web design company and draft a long-term site maintenance plan.
Doing so should ensure that your site operates optimally while driving in traffic and scaling up your rankings.
4. Wasted Time, Effort and Money
When an update becomes available, don’t think twice; neither should you procrastinate.
Make the updates as they become available. If you fail to do so, you’ll have to go back and make them later.
The results? Higher development and Q/ A effort. Put plainly, the website developer will need to spend much more time making the necessary updates,
Being that the impact on the website is more significant because of the higher number of updates and module changes over time.
Furthermore, more time is required for QA due to the increased functionality on the website affected.
Making necessary updates immediately after they become available can do you and your website lots of good.
It doesn’t only offer you the latest and greatest functionality pronto, it also improves your site.
5. Unusable Features and Terrible User Experience.
Why do business owners update their websites? To prevent security threats, right? Of course! But that is not all.
Updating your site equips it with new features and functionality, which goes a long way in thrilling your visitors.
The sooner you make that update, the sooner you get that new functionality capable of increasing user experience and prolonging visitors’ stay on your site.
Haven’t you gotten the concept? If yes, imagine what happens when you fail to update your phone. That is the same reason why you need to update your website.
When you update your site, you transform it from the old Lamborghini 350 GT to the Lamborghini Aventador. We bet you’d love such a breathtaking transformation!
Conclusion
While you splurge cash on services like marketing, SEO, website security, etc., It makes sense to consider keeping some cash aside for website maintenance.
Your site needs regular maintenance to function optimally. The security of your site, user experience, and a couple of other factors depend on your site’s maintenance.
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