Why do I need Website Maintenance?
So, you’ve created a website that’s perfect for your business. It looks great and functions well. Now, all you need to do is ensure the content stays up to date, and all should be perfect. The customers will keep coming, and everything will keep running smoothly. Pretty simple, right?
Wrong!
There’s so much more to maintaining a quality website than adding a few new blogs or a handful of different photos or videos. That’s just updating. Website maintenance involves other steps that ensure its overall health and performance. Website Management – or lack thereof – can affect security, sales, and SEO strategies and impact visitors’ first impressions of your site.
What needs to happen?
Watershed9 does several things regularly for website maintenance.
Security updates
Keeping your website secure is super important, especially if you’re doing monetary transactions on your site. Your website is left vulnerable to hackers, malware, and viruses when security updates are not made.
Content management systems such as WordPress issue several security-related updates yearly; skipping them is not an option.
Updating themes, plug-ins, and integrations
WordPress and other content management systems constantly update themes, plug-ins, and integrations that run on your website. These updates improve functionality and help avoid those despised error messages that can pop up with things aren’t kept up-to-date. Without these updates, your customers/clients aren’t getting the best user experience available, and, in a worst-case scenario, parts of your website can fail or break down.
Checking links
Many websites have links to a third-party site or an outside organization. Of course, you have no control over what those third parties do with their site, so it could be that your links are now broken and go nowhere.
Maintaining a website can involve checking those links to ensure they are still valid.
Speed tests
These days, Google uses the mobile version of your website to determine its speed, which can affect your website search rankings. No one likes to sit at their desk and wait while a website slowly loads onto their computer. We live in a world where faster is better where technology is concerned, so we’re constantly striving for the quickest possible download for your website. If not, current or potential customers will wander away and likely never return to your site. That means you’ve lost out on precious business.
Mobile reviews
According to research, 2/3 of all smartphone owners have made purchases on their devices. Many users do so weekly or even daily. Whether it’s a cup of coffee or a refrigerator, they made these purchases because they could easily navigate the purchase process on their phone. You lose business when your website isn’t mobile-friendly, so checking for accessibility is essential.
Contact forms
Finally, if you have a contact form on your website, you want to be sure that it continues to go to the correct place or person the moment an interested client or customer hits “submit”. As such, part of our Managed Plus Hosting Plan involves checking that regularly and making adjustments where necessary.
Website Maintenance plans
It’s the rare business owner who has time to handle all aspects of his Internet presence, including website maintenance. Furthermore, most know little about themes and plug-ins, making maintenance time-consuming and confusing. That’s why Watershed9 has set up a robust system to ensure your site remains healthy and your framework is up-to-date.
Website Management is more than just having accurate content on your website; for that, you need constant contact between the business and the web builder. We understand that and make maintenance and management a priority. To learn more about our comprehensive plans and packages, please visit our website Hosting & Management page.