You’ve recently launched your own business. To reach out to your potential online consumers, you hired a professional website developer – who charged you $15,000 for a five-pager website.
You think you have all the elements in the right place and start investing $2,000 each month in blog post-production and $5,000 each month in PPC ads.
But just when you think everything’s going smooth – BAM!
You realize that your website has been hacked.
Did you know that 87% of websites possess medium-to-high cyber security risks? And the worst part is – 68% of website owners don’t really have a fool-proof recovery plan in place.
And it’s just one possibility.
If you don’t invest in website maintenance:
- You’ll witness your web pages loading incredibly slowly.
- Installed plugins and software will become outdated.
- Your back-end will be really cluttered.
- You’ll be unable to ensure that there are no broken links.
- You’ll be unable to investigate and deal with 404 errors.
If you are investing thousands of dollars in website development, it’s incredibly important to ensure that there’s a magician out there maintaining your website for you.
To help you better understand why website maintenance is super-important, we’ve put together this blog post, where we’ll be shedding light on the three BIG reasons Boise-based businesses should invest in website maintenance
But before we dive a bit further into it, let’s understand a bit more about website maintenance and what the ongoing tasks involve.
What is Website Maintenance?
Let’s say you purchased a new home in Idaho and invested thousands of dollars in renovation. When you and your family members finally move in, you can’t resist but fall in love with the new furniture, fresh paint, and almost everything else.
But over time, if you do not invest in maintenance, everything will start falling apart. From clutter to cracks in the walls to messy lawn, you’ll soon end up hating the same place that you once couldn’t resist falling in love with.
And just like home maintenance is important, you need to invest in website maintenance. Your newly developed website may load incredibly fast, will be secure, and will have a clean backend.
Also, all the plugins and software will be up-to-date.
But, if you don’t invest in website maintenance, you’ll find your website getting slower, with outdated software and plugins, home to numerous 404 errors and more.
This will, in turn, affect your position in the search engine ranking pages – which is the last thing you’d want as a business owner.
In a nutshell, website maintenance is the process of conducting regular checks to ensure that it’s performing well. From checking broken links to updating your software and plugins to working on mobile-friendliness, website maintenance is an ongoing process and involves numerous weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual tasks.
Weekly Website Maintenance Tasks:
| Identifying 404 Errors |
| Identifying Broken Links |
| Updating Core Plugins & Software |
| Daily Website Backups |
| As-needed Website Support |
Monthly Website Maintenance Tasks:
| Monitoring Website Speed |
| Website Audit Checking for Broken Elements |
| Checking Mobile Optimization |
| Conducting & Analyzing Website Scans |
| Update Your Content Periodically |
While I’ve listed down these tasks without considering the individual requirements of different industries, some may vary depending on your individual needs.
3 BIG Reasons Boise-based Businesses Should
Invest in Website Maintenance
The three following reasons are why you need to invest in regular website maintenance:
- It helps ensure good user experience
- It helps keep your website secure
- It helps maintain & improve your search engine rankings
It Helps Ensure a Good User Experience
Over 88% of website visitors have reported that they’ll never return to a website after having a bad user experience. At the same time, you’ll be shocked to know that of all the businesses that fail, one of the primary reasons behind 70% failing is bad usability.
In today’s ever-competitive world, delivering a great user experience is a must. From the moment your potential or existing customers visit your website to the moment they add products to their cart and purchase your product to every possible action they take while they’re exploring your website, it’s important to make sure that you’re delivering a great user experience.
As your page load time goes from one to three seconds, the probability of your website visitors bouncing off increases by a staggering 32%. If your website visitors are trying to add a product to their carts yet are facing technical glitches, you’ll witness a massive spike in the bounce-off rate.
By investing in website maintenance, you’ll be able to ensure that you’re working on the right elements that’ll help you ensure a smooth user experience.
Over time, as you keep adding content, images, plugins, software, and more, it’s important to ensure that none of it is slowing your website down. By deleting spam comments, removing unwanted plugins, optimizing your website database, and more, investing in website maintenance will help you keep not only your website front-end but also the back-end clean.
When our clients hire us to conduct weekly website maintenance, we conduct thorough weekly, monthly and annual checks to help ensure that your website speed is not getting slower, there are no 404 errors, your website is secure, and more. At the same time, we help our clients improve their website performance, allowing them to ensure better positioning on the SERPs and hit their KPIs.
It Helps Keep Your Website Secure
Recently, we witnessed one of our known friend’s websites get hacked because of outdated software. And the thing is – they didn’t have any recovery plan in place.
And as mentioned already, 87% of websites possess medium-to-high cyber security risks. At the same time, about 98% of WordPress-based websites are vulnerable to third-party plugins.
Suppose you don’t implement the proper measures and keep installing every plugin without ensuring that they are from a reputable developer(s). In that case, your website will be at risk of getting hacked.
At the same time, if your website doesn’t have an SSL certificate, your website visitors will find it incredibly hard to trust you. After all, nobody wants to add their personal information or credit card details to a “not secure” website.
To keep your website secure, you should:
- Keep your software & plugins up-to-date
- Shield against XSS attacks
- Look out for SQL injection
- Avoid installing plugins from random plugin developers
- Use HTTPS
- And more!
When you hire our strategic experts, you can rest assured that we’ll take the right measures to help you keep your website secure, allowing you to not only keep yourself at peace of mind but also give your website visitors the confidence to go ahead and further explore your website.
It Helps Improve & Maintain Your Search Engine Rankings
Google’s primary focus is on putting the most relevant users in front of them. At the same time, they want to make sure that they’re not putting slow-loading or “Not Secure” websites in front of their users – which is why they track numerous metrics like bounce-off rate, average session rate, and many more to determine a web page’s position on the SERPs.
If you want to improve and maintain your search engine rankings, you need to be in Google’s good grace and play by the rules. Even if you are publishing the most value-adding and highly-optimized blog post, it’ll never rank at the top if your website loads slowly or isn’t secure.
Alongside a veteran website maintenance team, we’ve strategic SEO specialists who will work together to help you improve and maintain your search engine rankings. Not only will we help you ensure a good end-to-end user experience, but also work on your website performance allowing you to rank at the top of search engines!
Not investing in website maintenance is a BIG mistake most businesses make – and one you should avoid.
At redfox visual, we help businesses not only build a visually stunning and highly-functional website but also help them ensure that it’s in the best shape at all times.
And we would love nothing more than to help you out.
Join the redfox visual club comprising 100+ Boise-based businesses working with our strategic web design and development as well as SEO experts to level up their marketing efforts.
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