WEBSITE MAINTENANCE

Setting up a website is one of the biggest milestones you can ever achieve in your online business. If you already own one and is up and running, you’re doing great. If you’ve not and are in the process of building one, you’re making a good step.?

To have consistent optimum results in your website, it’s important to consider one more step, maintaining it.?

Several tools are available online to help you maintain your website. You can also hire an expert to do the job for you. The process simply involves monitoring, updating and fixing any bugs if any comes up.

Why Website Maintenance is Important

The answer to this question lies in the important factors you need to consider when maintaining your website. Below are some key components that require regular updates while running a website.?

SEO?

Your aim in starting your website is probably establishing an online presence so as to attract an audience or advertise your business or offer services. The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is such a critical aspect if you want to drive traffic to your site.?

For Google to increase your index rank in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), then you need to keep your website constantly updated. This means that your content, keywords, and articles have to be always up to date so you can consistently rank well on Google.

If you leave your website unchecked or even worse, leave it vulnerable to malware, you risk de-indexation since Google also works constantly to protect its users.?

User Experience (UX)

User experience means how visitors in your website interact with features embedded in your site to meet their needs or goals. Executing website maintenance helps you identify difficulties your users may be experiencing while navigating through your website. More importantly, you’ll be able to keep up to date plugins and additional features since website features keep evolving to increase user efficiency.?

Constantly improving user experience in your website will potentially increase traffic and conversion rates in your website.?

Security

Nothing is as important as protecting your website from hackers. This not only protects content in your website but also protects your business, your clients, customers, and users of your website.?

This is especially critical to website owners who use wordpress for their content management system. By 2018, wordpress was accounted to be the most hacked CMS with 90% users targeted by hackers. Vulnerability increased when website owners failed to update their plugins, themes, and firewall systems.?

It’s a real pain when you neglect your website and staying oblivious of opportunistic hackers. Maintaining your website will not only protect your website from potential hackers, but will protect your online presence as well as your business.??

Up-to-date Content

Staying updated with the current trends in news, information and technology is critically important if you want to maintain visitors in your website. This means aiming at decreasing the bounce rate on your website.

Everyone is always on the lookout for any new information and almost every second, people want to know the latest news on the internet. Most people consider Google as the quickest way of getting the latest information.?

Installing softwares and apps to help you get the latest news or information on any topic can greatly help maintain constant traffic on your website.?

Executing a Website Maintenance Plan

To execute a website maintenance plan, you need to know what elements to work on when maintaining a website. The following are examples of packages listed to guide you on what to do when maintaining your website:

Monthly Server Updates

This involves occasionally puting the web server offline so as to work on backend updates and settings on your website. These may include but not limited to installed themes, plugins, softwares, security updates, performance and analytics analysis,? just to name a few. You may wonder if this will temporarily shut down your website. No, your website can still remain live while working on updates. However, some features on the website may be affected as you conduct your routine maintenance.

To make this process easier, put a planned outage on schedule and time when the website is least visited. For instance during night hours. This will keep your website from unproductivity as your users will always find your website updated during peak hours.?

This is an important step since hackers always target servers where businesses and companies store their information.?

Continuous Upgrades

This involves continually improving your web features. Some important web features to consider for upgrade include plug-in installations, theme settings, SEO, website content, landing pages, calls-to-action (CTAs), mobile features, accessibilityamong many others.?

Continuous Data Backup

In case you want to update new features in your website or perhaps wordpress updates their CMS, it’s important you backup your content as well as the back end codes making up your website. That is, javascript, html, css, etc. the code that has been used to build your website.?

Backing up your data will ensure you don’t lose any important data in case you make regular upgrades in your website.?

How You Can Pay For Website Maintenance Services

This is probably the most important step for you to take when considering website maintenance services.?

It’s essential to get an expert or partner who’s willing to study and understand your business or services you’re offering through your website so he or she can work on maintaining your website based on the needs and requirements of your business. This will not only optimize your business for success, but will also help in boosting conversions and thus profits made through your website.?

That’s why at times the best option is to get a long-term partner to maintain your website. That way, you can agree on payment terms in the long run and perhaps adapt to the best payment plan.?

One-time Payment

This involves paying your partner once he or she completes the entire website maintenance package on your website. It may be once a month or once in every few months depending on what you’ve settled on together. As a client, you can decide to come up with terms and conditions of contract which you’ll sign alongside your website maintenance partner then execute it as he or she offers you his or her services.?

Retainer Plan

This kind of payment plan is more flexible and always varies depending on changes occurring. For example, when wordpress upgrades their content management system or if themes and plugins installed have new updates.?

This plan is more viable in the long run. You’ll work with your partner based on the needs that come up on your website and agree on what payment to offer depending on the current situation. Most clients adopt this method as it causes less conflict with the hired expert and is more focused on building client-partner relationships rather than using a contract to guide your payment terms and relationship.?

Website Maintenance Checklist

Suppose you want to maintain your website. You at least have some good knowledge in web development and are conversant with the components in your website that require constant updates.?

Consider writing down a checklist of items to update or work on in the back end of your website. That way, you’ll ensure every section of your website is well attended without neglecting the most important components.?

Bottom Line

You can never underestimate the importance of a website maintenance plan. Hackers day and night try to hack websites to get sensitive information and thus harm your web visitors as well as your business.?

Regularly updating your website also helps in boosting your online visibility and your index rank on Google’s first Search Engine Results Page.?

It may seem costly at first sight, but you’ll notice in the long run, you’ll save tons of costs evading preventable situations that could harm your website and thus your business.??