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Why Should You Take Website Maintenance Seriously?

By designbox
Est. Reading: 6 minutes

Why Should You Take Website Maintenance Seriously?

Just like anything in life, if you don’t look after something, it will eventually break or stop working. A website is no different: they require maintenance to keep them working just how they should be.

Avoiding website maintenance is like avoiding regular oil changes and servicing on your vehicle. You wouldn’t drive your car for very long if it weren’t serviced and maintained?

You’ll probably end up with a blown head gasket broken down on the side of a road at the most inconvenient time. Believe it or not – this is precisely the same for any website.

I like to think of website maintenance like insurance, giving you some peace of mind. In short, it’s like getting insurance on your car, but not only are you making sure your vehicle is covered, but it’s also upgrading the car at the same time.

And what happens if your website gets hacked and is not backed up or being looked after? Not only could you lose all of the hard-earned money you’ve invested into your website and marketing, but you could also be losing money while the site is down.

Angry crazy modern designer in glasses with beard yelling and crumpling paper on his workplace

 

The Worst Scenario That We’ve Come Across!

We had a very terrible situation just over a year ago.

A company had approached us after their site (from another provider, we won’t mention for obvious reasons) had been hacked and had malware injected across their whole website.

The company was top of Google for some competitive keywords and relied on these positions for their primary income. Unfortunately, it took us weeks to repair the damage and to rebuild a good part of the website. Not only did they have a hefty bill for the repair, but Google noticed that their site had malware and that it was a security risk for anyone going into it.

They disappeared off all of the top spots in the search engines.

All the hard work they had invested over the years was lost. In turn, they lost thousands and thousands of pounds all because someone wasn’t taking care of their website. Your website should be live 24/7/365 days a year — Ready for customers to view and be representing your business at its finest.

The Biggest Mistake Businesses Make…

“Great I’ve got my new website now time to relax”

Wrong, websites are not “Set & Forget”. 

If you don’t have website maintenance in place, you could be throwing your hard earned money out of the window. If a customer goes to a website and experiences problems, they often lose confidence and don’t stick around for long. 

Most website owners won’t check their website and all its functions. Missed website issues or downtime could lose you potential customers and potential sales.

We always encourage you to publish new content on your website and manage your website if you can, but that can be covered in website maintenance too. Fresh new content will always help you in the search engines and updates to your site will also help your site to stay fresh and up to date!

Updating or repurposing old content is another way of keeping your website fresh. Not only does it mean that this content will not be forgotten over time, but it means that you are making your content more relevant for the prospective customer. If they see content that states it was last updated 5 years ago, they may doubt your content and feel more inclined to look somewhere else for information.

What Are The Benefits Of Website Maintenance?

Many people don’t understand the primary benefits of having website maintenance, so here’s just a few:

The website’s performance, loading time, uptime and downtime can all be jeopardised. These problems can happen if the WordPress software isn’t functioning as it should be and plugin versions aren’t up to date.

The growth of any website is paramount. Keeping the users engaged and showing search engines that your site is active, relevant and current. Fresh content, analytics monitoring, design improvements and updates are all dependent on someone making sure all updates to the website are done in a smooth and error-free fashion on an ongoing basis.

Websites are moving fast into the future, and nowadays it’s important to have features on your site that integrate with social media. This wasn’t as important 10 years ago, but through steady website maintenance, forward-thinking companies have been able to easily adapt.

Also, online security is an area that can be improved through maintenance because this will allow customers their personal details safe with you through encryption of communications. This is another benefit that directly positively affects the customer, allowing them to feel safe when browsing, solidifying their trust with you in the process.

A website is a representation of your company. It should reflect the image you want to project and represent all that it offers, such as products or services for sale in its online store. This is why user experience is so important.

If something on your site looks amiss then this could be limiting customer interest from potential new clients who visit just once yet never return again because they are disappointed with their initial experience at navigating through pages full of error messages rather than relevant information about what you provide them

 

Our Maintenance Workflow Will Help Your Website

At Design Box Media, we take the utmost care to ensure we always backup the website. We have ongoing back-ups to ensure nothing is lost or broken when updating the website. Once the site is updated, we always double-check for any issues.

Our software will keep a complete record of all of the plugins we update too!

If there is ever an issue with a function on the site, we can see what plugin version was changed, and we will revert it to the last working version and then investigate the issue.

We also include in our “monthly website maintenance packages” reports of the sites performance and constant security scans. If in the event there is an issue with a plugin on the site, we set it up as an urgent support ticket, and we address the issue promptly before you even know there’s a problem.

The Dangers Of DIY Website Maintenance

If you’re maintaining your website yourself, it could cost you much more than you may realise. For example, you just press that update button on your website because it tells you that there’s a new update (everybody loves a new update, right?

What if the site breaks or stops working after you update it? You most likely won’t have a backup of how it was before you clicked update. 

How do you even back the site up? 

If for any reason an update for a plugin created an issue on the site a few weeks later, it’s going to be hard to know when it went wrong, how it went wrong and how you should revert back without restoring a very old backup (and possibly losing content changes, sales orders, contact entries, you name it).

 

It will cost more to fix than it will to maintain.

Neglect or inexperience will damage the look and functionality of any website. When that happens, you’ve got to make a decision:

  • Option 1: You try and fix it yourself, in which case you may do further damage or spend a huge amount of time trying to learn code or rebuild the website.
  • Option 2: You can then pay the (sometimes hefty) price for someone experienced to fix it when it breaks.

Just like your cars servicing, it costs more to change a blown engine than it does to service and change the oil ona recommended basis. Regular servicing will help keep your car running properly, regular site maintenance helps keeps your website running properly.

Price value SEO

Call In A Professional

Why not spend your valuable time doing what you do best and let us deal with what we know best? Would you try to fight a court battle without a lawyer? Then why try to maintain your own website if you’re not a web professional?

By securing an experienced web professional to update and maintain your site properly, you are actually saving potential lost sales and visitors.

If you’re interested in securing a maintenance contract for your website, contact us to learn how we can keep your site in proper working order.

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