As a business owner we usually think that creating a website for our business is a one-time task, once developer completely develop the site for us it’s done and it will now make you money in the long run – but it doesn’t work that way.
Having a business website is also a responsibility. It’s like purchasing a real-estate property, you can’t just purchase it and leave it without any caretaker or property manager. You need someone to maintain it for you.
Imagine your own property without proper maintenance, you can imagine it being so dirty,
That’s what your website also looks if you don’t maintain it the correct way.
So yes, your website also needs a regular maintenance.
What Is Website Maintenance?
First, let’s define what is Website maintenance, according to Fingerprint Marketing it is the act of regularly checking your website for issues, errors, and mistakes and keeping it updated and relevant. This should be done on a regular and consistent basis in order to keep your website healthy, encourage continued traffic growth, and strengthen your SEO and Google rankings.
Keeping a website well maintained and attractive is important to companies big and small in order to engage and retain customers. It’s easy for businesses, especially startups, to cut corners and let a few tasks slide.
Regular monitoring of your website is a must for keeping your business running smoothly.
What are the advantages of Website Maintenance to your business?
We all know the importance of having a well-structured website. But having it up and running is not enough. So here are some of the advantages you can enjoy when you properly manage your site.
Avoid getting hacked
We know that anything can be hacked and exposed in the internet, even Facebook’s 533 million users’ data have been leaked online (Business Insider).
So we’re not closing for the possibility that your website can be hacked.
But that probability will be lower and we can even prevent that kind of issues when your regularly update your website. Updating your website’s plugin, regular checking on your codes, and checking every page section will be helpful to track vulnerabilities of your website.
In Pinfront Digital, we offer Website maintenance with daily back up inclusion. So once we got exposed (if ever). We can restore the latest version as fast as possible. *Website restored in a snap of the finger*
Prevent risks of damage of your site’s reputation
According to a study by Accenture, 68% of business leaders feel their cybersecurity risks are increasing.
45% of breaches featured hacking, 17% involved malware and 22% involved phishing (Verizon).
I had an experience before when I was still employed on a Microsoft partner company, we have a international client that opt out to avail our Website Maintenance package because of the reason that ‘they don’t need it’ and ‘their internal staffs can do it’
Unfortunately, after a few months the site get hacked and exposed by an unknown hacker. The hacker posted NSFW links to the sites’ homepage. It was a disaster for the brand.
Imagine getting 30,000 website visitors on your site and all of them saw the ‘not so good for children’ contents. I guess that’s the amount to pay for being too thrifty and opting out for website maintenance.
Don’t sacrifice your brand image for small amount of website maintenance service.
Regular Content Updates
We all hate visiting a website and seeing latest updates of about 3yrs ago. That’s literally like a forgotten website. That’s the biggest turn-off if you’re an eager visitor who want to get some specific information or updates.
Website maintenance includes regular content updates like blogs, articles, newsletter and even contact information updates. You don’t want to mislead any user to a wrong phone number, outdated email and too old blog post.
A regularly updated website helps promote your brand, work, and mission.
Customer Satisfaction/Engagement
No matter how much money you invested in your website way back before, your audience can tell if it’s not well maintained. An outdated and not maintained website can cause your users to lose trust in your brand.
An updated and well maintained website can build up your brand awareness and even attract new customers. When you’re regular content is relevant and interesting people will most-likely be a returning visitor of your site in the long run. Having that said, more users will get back and view your contents means more chance they will convert to become a loyal customer.
As they said trust is earned not given, make your website a source of trust and satisfaction and the sales will follow.
Keep updated to the latest technology
According to Google Research, the average time it takes to fully load a mobile landing page is 22 seconds. Yet 53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than three (3) seconds to load.
Does your site falls in these numbers?
If not, you need to revisit your website code and assets, which is part of a regular maintenance checklist.
In Pinfront we include regular technology updates in our website maintenance package, this includes plugin updates, overall platform updates, and even code updates. These updates will prevent your site in becoming a slow loading page. No one wants to visit an old school (old tech) website.
To conclude, website maintenance maybe not a top priority for some business owners but in reality this is a huge factor on our digital marketing success.
Interested in Website Maintenance Service? We can help!
Article written by:
Jae-Mar Arenque
Digital Marketing Specialist
Owner – Pinfront Digital