At first, website maintenance looks like an easy step to skip. But believe it or not, your website’s maintenance can silently impact your business in more ways than one. Most business owners tend to think of website maintenance as an ongoing activity that doesn’t lead to direct business results. Read this article to find out the reality of how website maintenance can impact your business.
Website maintenance plays a fundamental role in your website’s well-being. Just like in the case of your house, your car, or any other physical assets where low maintenance leads to rust, dust and downtime, the same is true for websites too.
Physical assets like cars can fall apart without regular oil change, tyre pressure checks, and other forms of maintenance. Likewise, a not-so-well-maintained website can start to throw up several problems.
At first, the problems are small — a broken link here or an outdated image there. And before you know it, some website sections begin to look old. Over time, these small problems can snowball into much bigger problems such as error pages, graphics issues and those that can bring your business to a grinding halt. Ecommerce websites can be especially impacted due to website downtime since an ecommerce business depends entirely on its website.
Invaluable Benefits of Website Maintenance
Website maintenance is extremely critical if you wish to keep your site at the top of its performance. Regular website maintenance means much more than simply keeping your site up and running. From improving website functionalities and enhancing the overall experience to bringing your business better results, website maintenance can do it all.
Your website must evolve and grow with your business. It could be the addition of new pages, features, or functionalities. It could be some tweaks in user navigation or anything that makes it relevant and supremely functional for your users. A trusted web development company can help you achieve all this very easily and at an affordable cost.
Here are a few ways in which website maintenance can help your business directly:
1. Improves your SEO (search engine optimization)
SEO is everything. It’s one of the most powerful ways in which businesses can be discovered online. Not appearing within the first few pages of a Google search can seriously impact business. Website maintenance ensures that your SEO score improves each time and, as a result, your ranking gets better until more customers discover you easily through their online search. This is, without a doubt, one of the most powerful ways to grow your business.
2. Keeps your website updated and relevant
Your website needs to look modern and updated to appeal to today’s customers. Regular website maintenance ensures that your website gets the latest designs, features, and functionalities in the market. Such upgrades not only make your website perform better but also lead to more customer loyalty and retention.
3. Maximizes the number of business opportunities
Achieving a good SEO score automatically ensures that your business opportunities increase many times over. Adding new functionalities can also help your business immensely by making the whole website user journey website more natural and intuitive, leading to more clicks and conversions.
4. Creates a good impression
Your website is the face of your business. It’s the heart of your brand identity. Every business needs a great online presence in today’s day and age. Why would users spend more time on your website if it’s slow and clunky? Regular website maintenance can help you create and maintain a good impression over time, which in turn has a butterfly effect on your business results.
5. Prevents sudden and unpredictable downtime
Just like how regular health checks can prevent sudden heart attacks, strokes or deaths, regular website maintenance can help prevent major technical issues that come in the way of your website’s seamless performance. Businesses that depend solely on their websites must ensure that there is no downtime. Website crashes not only affect business revenues but also brand reputation.
6. Saves money in the long run
Neglecting or postponing website maintenance can lead to a larger cost to fix these issues later. It’s best to hire a reliable website maintenance company and set up frequent website maintenance sessions so that all problems are fixed on the go instead of having them pile up over time.
Common improvements you can expect from regular website maintenance
Hiring an experienced website maintenance company gives you access to their expertise and years of experience. Here are some checks and improvements you can expect as part of your website maintenance contract with them. Look for these before signing a new web maintenance contract.
1. Regular Site Backup Checks
In the event of a website crash, you must have your website content and design backed up. Otherwise, you might permanently lose everything on your site in a moment. Therefore, you need weekly website maintenance to ensure your site backups are properly scheduled.
2. Broken Links and Pages Check
Broken links and pages can have disastrous results on your website. Imagine one of your website visitors clicking on a link and going nowhere. Your website must be checked for broken links and pages on a weekly basis. That way, you can catch problems before they lose your business and money.
3. Content Updates
Updating website content every week isn’t just highly important from an SEO perspective but also for keeping your website relevant with the passing of time. Whether it’s a blog post, a new landing page, a new image, or just a paragraph of new content, these regular changes can boost your website from the core. Setting up regular website maintenance tasks ensures you’re always putting your best foot forward.
4. Reducing Page Load Time
A 1-second delay in page load times can lead to a 7% drop in business conversions. Many different factors such as large images, cluttered coding, and many more can slow down your website. To keep your website at top speed, you need to check your page load time frequently and quickly address the issues that increase the load time.
5. Checking browser compatibility
Is your website working well on a certain browser and failing to load on another browser behind your back? That’s dangerous for business! Your website must load properly on all popular browsers with equal efficiency. Website maintenance companies regularly check your website’s browser compatibility before it starts affecting your business without you knowing it.
6. Design Updates
In the ever-evolving world of websites, web design trends change quickly. Keeping your web design updated by incorporating new trends and adhering to new guidelines can help your website run smoothly and appeal to today’s website visitors.
7. Overall Consistency
Your site can lose a little bit of consistency over time. From content and design consistency to technical consistency, it helps to have your website maintenance company keep an eye out for any glitches or suspicious activities that might in the short or long run affect your business.
Get in touch with a reputed website maintenance and support company for a comprehensive list of checks and improvements that your business deserves.
All That’s Good. But How Much Does It Cost?
Think of website maintenance as an important business investment. You need to hire a web development company to help you with keeping your site up and running well. Some activities such as backing up your site, maintaining your domain name, and others might come at an extra cost.
That said, the cost of maintaining your website regularly will be far lesser than the cost of fixing problems when they arise. For example, while regular website maintenance works out on a monthly fee, fixing a website crash can be far more expensive.
Conclusion
Many business owners wonder why their websites are not bringing in new business. Often they’re unaware of the fact that the reason could be their websites. Get a free consultation from a professional website maintenance company today to know how you can improve your website with immediate effect.
