Although you might love your website when it’s created, if you don’t keep up with the website maintenance you’re missing out on important updates and attracting new customers!
Everything meant to survive for the long term needs maintenance. For example, a home needs renovations and maintenance if there’s a leaky pipe. A car needs annual oil changes and may need a changed muffler from time to time. Even your body needs maintenance; checkups at the doctor’s and dental office (although how many of us really go to all our dental checkups?) are inevitable!
So What Is Website Maintenance and Why Is It Important?
It’s pretty simple—website maintenance includes consistently updating and checking on your website to make sure that everything is running smoothly and that your website is at its top performance. Keeping your website updated and constantly monitoring it helps with SEO, your Google ranking, and overall security. Maintaining your website is also important when attracting new users, and keeping existing users interested. Whether your business is big or small, website maintenance should be a regular part of your business activities.
Why? Well, websites are the heart of your business. If you don’t give them the love and care that they deserve, customers will think you’ll do the same with them.
What to Check During Website Maintenance:
- Does your site load and run smoothly?
- Are there any software updates to be done?
- Copy errors: are there any?
- Is there any dated content?
- Can anything be added to spice things up?
- Is the current SEO still relevant?
- Are there new keywords or phrases I can add?
- Do any marketing campaigns need to be updated or removed?
The Importance of System Updates
Websites need to be updated regularly. If you use a Content Management System (CMS) for your website, you have to keep up with their security updates to prevent hackers and malware. This is the main reason for keeping up with updates. Since updating your website puts you at a lower risk of hacking, search engines like Google are more likely to rank your website higher in search results. Updating is also great to increase the overall speed of your website! Unfortunately, humans are impatient—nobody wants to wait longer than 10 seconds for pages to load. The slower your website, the higher the chance that people will click off of your site. Since most people view sites on their mobile devices, it’s crucial to have a speedy website for those users.
Improving User Experience
When you maintain your website, there are a few things you want to have checked. Make sure there are no spelling mistakes, that all your links are working properly, that all information is up to date, and see if there is any old content that needs to be removed. This allows for a perfect site that makes your website that much more credible. People will be more hesitant to buy whatever it is you are selling if they notice that a lot of links don’t work or if there are a lot of spelling mistakes.
Besides the technical details, it’s always important to change the visuals of the website. It’s great to keep up with the latest trends and freshen up your website! Who doesn’t love a good makeover? You might be asking, “Why do I need to change my website if it functions well and I like how it looks? My business is already doing well.”
The answer is, your business might be doing well, but it could be doing even better. Humans love the idea of progress—that’s why so many of us get bored of our daily routines. The same goes for websites! Users will be more interested when they revisit your website and see something new, or if a new viewer sees something fun and on-trend.
Some Changes You Can Make Include:
- Changing the navigation bar
- Adding seasonal or holiday themes
- Including a newsletter sign up
- Updating your photos
- Playing with the layout
- Including custom illustrations and photography
- Adding animations
- Updating icons
When Do I Need to Do Website Maintenance?
It’s best to do it as often as you can. If you put off maintenance for too long, it will be a longer process compared to if you did minor tweaks every couple of weeks. It would be best to do simple check ups once a week, and overall updates and slight aesthetic adjustments once a month.
Who Does Website Maintenance?
You could do your website maintenance yourself if you’d like. Of course, not everyone has the time to run a business while also keeping up with the technical details, and you may not have the expertise to know where to start. If you don’t want to or aren’t able to deal with the maintenance yourself, you can always hire a company to do it for you, like us at Siva! With Siva, there are a few packages for website maintenance that you can choose from. With a marketing, development, and design team all under one roof, we have the knowledge and know-how to keep your website on-trend and working smoothly. Leave all the hassle to the experts!
Now that you have a better idea of how to spend your maintenance hours, check out our maintenance packages or give us a call.
(705) 716-1676
