What should website maintenance include?
Having a website is a great tool and essential in today’s digital arena. Your website is the 24/7 online portal of your business and it can have a big impact on how the value of your product or service is perceived. However, simply having a website and just keeping it there on live is not enough. With so much competition out there, you need to be sure your website ranks well on the search engine for your target market. There are many factors to making this happen but one of the most important is a website maintenance on a regular basis.
What is Website Maintenance?
According to WebPageFX :
“ In order to attract and retain customers, maintain search engine rankings, and provide information about your products and services to the public, your company needs website maintenance. ”
Many companies create beautiful websites, but they fail to understand the after building and launching a website, it doesn’t stop there forever. Just like cars, websites require proper maintenance to operate properly and have a successful business online.
Why Do You Need a Web Maintenance?
Whether it’s WordPress, Drupal or another open source CMS, many don’t realize the importance of enforcing regular and long-term web maintenance plan. Here are just a few of the important reasons to not ignore a regular website maintenance:
Website maintenance can boost your search engine rankings
Website maintenance keeps existing customers interested and helps catch the attention of new customers
An updated website keeps your website relevant and appealing which provides with the best possible user experience that will keep your existing web visitors engaged and attract new customers, which results to an increased conversion.
Website maintenance keeps your website updated with current technology
The web is continuously growing and changing. but is your website keeping up? New technology is constantly evolving for accessing your website and a proper maintenance helps your site grow and evolve to keep up with current technology.
Website maintenance improves security
If your organization is using a Content Management System (CMS) such as Drupal or WordPress, you will want to ensure that your site is keeping up with software patches and security updates which keep your website safe from hackers.
Security is the number one reason why website maintenance is important – and the primary problem that often makes news headlines.
Every web design or digital marketing agency have different website maintenance support packages. But here is a list of a complete maintenance that make up a solid and thorough strategy.
- Check website loading speed
- Checking broken links to your website
- Check for 404 errors and resolve these by fixing links or redirecting
- Review each page of the site for content accuracy
- Updating and renaming outdated or irrelevant images
- Adding, changing or removing videos
- Adding, changing or removing pdf files or documents
- Changing colors or layouts to any existing pages on your website
- Replacing or changing logos if needed
- Checking all forms to ensure they are working properly
- Renaming files or optimizing file names for Search Engines
- Updating your meta keywords, page titles, meta descriptions and other similar elements for SEO
- Creating a sitemap for search engines to more easily navigate your site
- Updating product inventory, pricing, shipping information
- Publishing blog posts to your existing blog
- Adding posts, images, or comments to your existing Facebook, twitter, Google+, or other social media
- Traffic statistics and details of visitor information
- Search Engine Optimization recommendations
- Create a Google Analytics dashboard to highlight the most important metrics for your site.
When is web maintenance should be done?
In most cases, SEO, security and content updates must be done at least monthly. While, usability and responsive updates could probably be completed during an annual website audit. And, web design and other important layout updates are recommended every 2 to 3 years.
Bottom line
Updating and maintaining the website regularly is the foundation for online success of a business. Website maintenance supplements your business goals, justifying a positive ROI. This is enough to support the idea that web maintenance is ensures the website’s performance at peak.
DON’T HAVE THE TIME?
If you really don’t have the time, skills and knowledge to spare to do the maintenance of your website, then it’s better to get an agency to do it than no one at all. Just make sure to choose the right one for your business needs!