Why Website Maintenance is Key to Business Success

Why Website Maintenance is Key to Business Success

(Serious about the growth of your business? Learn how website maintenance can make or break your business.)

Owning the best car in the market has one thing in common with running a website -- without regular maintenance, you run the risk of it becoming obsolete.

Getting a website designed by one of the best web design companies cannot by itself help your business succeed unless you account for its maintenance. With ever-changing digital marketing trends and customer expectations, regularly maintaining your website is critical for improving your chances of customer acquisition and retention.

So what is website maintenance? It is an umbrella term that involves various activities such as updating content, strengthening security protocol, fixing broken links, backing up the site, and monitoring traffic. In other words, any changes undertaken to make your website more user-friendly and enhance its visual appearance, without any changes to its core software or technology, falls within the maintenance domain.

Here’s why website maintenance is the secret sauce for boosting the success of your business:

6 reasons why you cannot skip scheduling maintenance for your website

1 - Optimising visitor experience

A website is only as good as its users find it. Studies show that it takes only 0.05 seconds for visitors to decide whether they wish to continue browsing your website, which means you have an extremely short window to create a solid impression.

Regularly maintaining your website goes a long way in delivering a delightful experience for visitors, which ultimately translates into success for your brand.

For instance, if you don’t update your website to adapt to a newer version of web browsers or your content management system, chances are that it can take longer than usual to load or even result in improper display. These can leave a sour taste in the mouth of your users, making them hit the exit button as soon as they land on your website. Such glitches can be easily avoided through scheduled maintenance.

2 - Increasing the security of your website

No one wants to risk their personal information while using a website. If the website is unsafe for its users, it will adversely impact your business. After all, if there is a sales machine that operates 24/7, it is your website, and any unpleasant user experience can result in losing a potential customer forever.

Security scanning is integral to website maintenance to secure your website from potential breaches and update security systems. The website maintenance team downloads the latest security patches and removes backdated modules that may be compromising the safety of your website. They also carry out penetration testing to check if there are any current threats to your website

Undertaking regular maintenance means you have a better chance of identifying vulnerabilities before they snowball into something bigger and cause irreparable harm.

3 - Updating content on your website

Content plays a key role in boosting brand awareness and building a relationship with your audience. When optimized correctly, it can help generate quality leads through organic search.

But this is only possible when your content assets are impeccable. Irrelevant and stale content can be an instant turn-off for a lead, making your business look unprofessional. Through website maintenance, you can ensure that the content of your website is accurate and tailored to the needs of the customers. You can also check whether the content aligns with your business's goals.

For instance, you may have launched some new products and retired old ones, requiring changes in product descriptions. Or, you may need to update old blog posts and case studies to add crucial data for your potential customers, reflecting the trends in the market as of date.

4 - Obtaining a backup

Every business underestimates the need to back up its website until it lands in a sticky spot after losing access to it.

Whether it is a team member who accidentally deletes one or a few pages of your website or you become a victim of a data breach, having a backup of your website protects the two critical R’s of your business -- revenue and reputation.

Creating a backup of the current version of your website is one of the core activities of a website maintenance exercise. A backup ensures that even if you lose information or access to your website, you can reduce downtime by leveraging the backup files. It also helps to formulate a disaster recovery strategy to know how soon you can get your website running in case of an unforeseen event.

That’s why experts recommend scheduled maintenance every week or every 2-3 days to ensure that you always have a copy of the latest version.

5 - Improving search engine rankings

In the digital age, SEO can make or break your business. The higher the ranking, the better the chances of your website showing up on the first page of results and receiving quality traffic.

Search engines only push forward those websites that comply with the latest SEO practices. This is only possible when your website is regularly updated and targets relevant keywords that users may be looking for.

There are several ways in which website maintenance aids your SEO efforts. For example, the maintenance team checks whether on-page and off-page SEO elements are in order and identifies other issues that may be contributing to a poor user experience and bringing down your rank. They also identify redirect errors and download the latest SEO plugins to reduce bounce rates.

6 - Ensuring your website caters to the needs of your audience

A proper website maintenance plan helps you to outrank the competition. There are various reporting and analytics tools that can provide valuable insights into visitors’ behavior on the website. The information can be utilized for making necessary adjustments and strategies to help you to take your customer right to the end of their buyer journey.

But the strategy for every website has to be as unique as the markets in which the business operates. Here’s where a local web design company can do a superior job at undertaking website maintenance of a website of a local business. They have a deeper understanding of what works for the target audience.

So if you are a business in Los Angeles, hiring a Los Angeles web design company means you won’t have to invest too much in explaining what your target audience prefers. The agency can suggest improvements to the aesthetics or branding of your website while ensuring it is relevant to the customers you wish to target.

Is website maintenance the same as website redesign?

Even though the terms are often used interchangeably, website maintenance is not a substitute for a website redesign.

Website redesign services are necessary when you are looking for a complete overhaul of your website, which includes changing the software, content management system, and graphics to create an entirely new website. It is far more extensive than a maintenance program.

To put it differently, the impact of a redesign is more than tweaking the visual appearance or ensuring that your website is for smooth and optimal performance.

Conclusion

Regardless of the size or scale of your business, scheduling website maintenance is critical if you want the website to support your business’s growth.

For a comprehensive website maintenance plan that takes care of everything on your wishlist, make sure to partner up with the right agency.