
Why is it Important to maintain your Website?
A healthy optimised website should be important to you, no matter what size your business is.
Your website is your worldwide window for your products and services, a poorly maintained site with stale content can have a huge impact on how your product or service is perceived. For anyone who has a service-based business this can be even more crucial, it can show your customers that you are on the cutting edge of your industry. It can make all the difference between winning that contract or losing out to a competitor!
So, what are the Basics?
All websites require regular basic maintenance to continue to function properly, but what does that actually mean?
As an example, we will assume you have a WordPress based website. (Don’t worry if you do not know what that is for the moment!)
Daily updates are released for WordPress core files, plugins, translations, and databases. Failing to perform these updates on a regular basis can leave your site open to hackers very quickly.
While some hacks are easily noticeable, such as content being added to your website, like banners advertising something that obviously has nothing to do with your product or service. Others can be sneaky, harvesting your customer data every time they visit the website, for which you are still responsible and accountable.
You should also regularly check the links to other pages/content and contact forms to make sure they work. The last thing you want is a number of customers trying to contact you through a website that doesn’t work.
If you are unsure about how to perform these updates, please speak to a professional!
What about the Content?
Your content includes your text and images, regularly reviewing and refreshing the content is important, as it helps to attract new customers as well as maintaining the interests of your current and previous customers.
Your content should always be simple and customer focused, the classic mistake made here is that industry professionals know the jargon, but customers often don’t. So please, keep your content easy to read and to the point. Overcomplicating the content can put customers off very quickly.
Now, how about Search Engines & SEO?
A well-maintained Website is critical to search engine rankings. Websites with out-of-date content and outstanding updates will rank lower, while infected sites may not rank at all and display warnings to visitors which will inevitably put most off even visiting the site.
Are you showing a good Corporate image?
In the current climate your website is your first impression to your customers. A poorly maintained website with broken links, errors, dead pages, and outdated content is going to give a messy corporate image and will probably lose you business over time.
It is important to routinely examine your website’s look, feel and functionality to ensure it matches the image you want it to portrait.
When things go wrong…
Sometimes even if you do everything right things can happen that are outside of your control. An update to your website, if not proven to be stable before you apply it, can break everything. Would you know how to fix it on your own? Having someone manage your website for you can be a very cost-effective and downtime avoiding way to ensure everything stays running as smooth as possible.
Please be aware: Cheap shared hosting can also be a nightmare, each vulnerable site on a server is a risk to the rest.
Why not get in touch to see the great packages we can offer to help maintain your website.