Is it Absolutely Essential to Keep Your Website Maintained?

You’ve just invested in a great new website for your business. It’s been professionally designed and you is hosted with a recommended provider. It’s exactly the right online presence for your brand, company or organisation.

If you’re happy with your website but don’t understand the importance of regular maintenance, then this post is for you.

Why?

Sadly having a great-looking, secure and functioning website isn’t enough. In fact, it’s only the start. Keeping it great is what’s important. Here are 4 reasons why regularly maintaining your website is so important for you and your customers.

#1 Protect Yourself From Nasty Hackers

Although your site might have been secure when it was published, the chances are it isn’t secure now. Hackers prey on static or out-of-date websites as they present a great opportunity to steal data easily, and often without being noticed.

This is bad enough if your site is a personal one, but if it’s linked with your business then the data that can be accessed, the bandwidth that can be stolen or the viruses that can be uploaded have a significant effect not only for you, but your clients and partners too.

Using a Content Management System like WordPress gives you access to regular software patches and security updates. You should always take advantage of these and employ this level of protection. However it can be a huge commitment if you’re busy to remember every week to keep everything tidy on the backend, performing all of your updates and you may not know how to keep the site secure.

If your site comes with the option of a maintenance plan, we offer maintenance to any WordPress website at a great price, you’d be well-advised to make use of it. If you are targeted by hackers or your site does become vulnerable, you’ll have peace of mind knowing that it won’t be you forking out to remedy the problem…even better, this is highly unlikely if you are on a good maintenance plan and your site is being maintained every day.

#2 Keep Things Fresh and Well Optimised

Online businesses thrive on search engine results. Companies like Google specifically look for websites that are regularly updated and will rank these more highly in search results.

The more your site is updated with content, the more visitors you will get. If you can convert those visitors into customers and clients, then your website is doing its job and you’re getting a return on your investment.

Making sure that you don’t have duplicate pages, broken links, or out-of-date information is just as important as generating new content in this respect. Keep your site tidy as well as updated, and you’ll notice a real difference in your traffic which leads to more sales.

Regularly reviewing and re-defining your keywords and keyword phrases is another practical and highly valuable way of maintaining your site and its potential. Think of this as a way of keeping your site visible and easy to find.

#3 Don’t Risk Letting Your Brand Down

A website is key to the development of your business. Your staff and customers come to rely on it as a tool on many different levels. The last thing you need is for your site to malfunction, either in part or in its entirety.

A good website maintenance plan will also involve the creation of regular back-ups. Should the worst happen, your site and all the content data is fully recoverable, and your backup can be restored. Without a regular back-up plan, your business and one of its most important assets remain vulnerable.

The technical integrity of your site is important. Your company’s integrity is also important in the eyes of your partners and customers.

Value them both, and they will be of value to you, too.

#4 Don’t Let Your Website Become Stale

The technology that powers your website is evolving every day. Performance improvements are released every week, making your site more efficient, more engaging and more productive. Staying on top of these updates and optimising your site’s potential makes will make your website even more valuable.

Sites that take a long time to load are frustrating for the user and less likely to appear high in search results. The net result is that you will attract fewer visitors to your site and are less likely to keep those that do find you.

Staying up to date will fix both of these potential barriers to volumizing your site traffic and sales.

These tips are invaluable, but there’s an even more compelling reason to maintain and regularly update your website.

You want your visitors to keep coming back.

TOP TIP: Make sure that you don’t just maintain your website from a technical perspective. Keep the content fresh too, so that visitors and customers get used to seeing new posts or products whenever they visit.

It isn’t professional if your event calendars haven’t changed from month to month, or if you are leaving your blogs to stagnate. If you’re not adding new products or services, make sure you add comments, additional information, reviews, or articles that generate interest and new visitors.

Conclusion: Keeping Your Website Maintained Could be the Make or Break of Your Brand

Without that basic level of maintenance, potential customers probably won’t engage with your site, no matter how well designed, and the chances are that your sales will be affected.

Your business is continually innovating, evolving and updating – Your website should be too.