A lot of people think that website development is a one-time project. They have their website built for them and then they relax thinking their work is done. The digital space keeps on changing and for that, you need to keep your website and the entirety of your business updated to remain relevant and in business. There is a need to include website maintenance services in your budget as your site requires routine maintenance to keep it working optimally all year round.
Your website represents to a large extent how your business or products and services are perceived by your audience. Having regular maintenance on your website ensures that your website is secure and running optimally.
However, the job does not just stop at including a website maintenance service cost in your budget, you also need to hire a professional website maintenance team to do a great job at providing your users with the best possible user experience.
What is website Maintenance Services?
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Website maintenance refers to the tasks involved in maintaining the overall working capacity of your website, to keep it up-to-date and running effectively.
This can usually be done weekly, monthly, or quarterly. It helps you discover what is not working on your site, fixes site issues that may arise, and ensures you do not lose any of your plugins and data.
What Does Website Maintenance Include?
Whether it’s weekly, monthly, quarterly, or even annual website maintenance, there are several things to look out for while performing your web maintenance.
If it’s a weekly check on your website then you need to use your google analytics account to track traffic to understand your site’s performance and see areas where you need to improve. If you know the number of bounce rates, site visitors, and where the traffic to your site is coming from, you can make better decisions.
For monthly checks, you get to check your web speed, security and ensure that you update your plugins and backup your web content. This is to avoid the loss of valuable information and prevent cyber attacks.
Quarterly checks involve a more in-depth approach to your web content as you review your content goals and metrics. During this check, you check your SEO, engagement, user behavior, and sales to see how they are coming up concerning your defined goals. This is the point where you ask yourself certain questions such as “what can I update on my content? Are all my meta descriptions as SEO effective as possible?”
Annual site maintenance is where you go over your site’s legal policy, the footer, and the header. You also go over your site’s domain name, and other additional tools you use for maintenance.
Here, you ensure that your information is up to date and that your site’s main menu categories and company photos reflect your business’s main interest.
Reasons You Should Include A Website Maintenance Services
As we initially mentioned, it doesn’t end at just designing your website, a more crucial task lies in its regular maintenance. Here are five(5) reasons you should budget for web maintenance costs.
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Security:
Website maintenance professionals ensure that they update your website to the latest versions. With the outbreak of cybercrime and hackers, website owners need to be careful in order not to lose their files or data to hackers. Through their periodic checks, the maintenance team helps to remove and fix any bugs or issues that may arise. You are advised to have a professional web maintenance team available to be able to perform these periodic checks, detect and fix bugs to forestall attacks.
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Working Backup:
Imagine if your system crashes and you haven’t been following a regular web maintenance plan, or haven’t even done any maintenance on your site before. It is unthinkable because you will have to start building the site from scratch again. Regular web maintenance enables you to have a reliable working backup that you can fall back to in case you have a system crash. Website maintenance experts usually backup two (2) elements which include the source (Javascript, plugins, etc) and the website contents such as texts, images, etc. This is to prevent the loss of files and plugins.
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Technological Advancement:
The internet is a rapidly changing world as newer technologies are being developed daily. Regular web maintenance of your website enables you to remain on top of your business as you adapt to newer technologies. A typical scenario is this, your user is unable to access your website using his mobile because your website is not mobile-friendly. The user may just leave the site and alternatively resort to your competitor. Whereas you should have fixed this if you had a professional website maintenance team who would work at implementing new technologies and techniques that will meet the demands of the audience.
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Saving Cost:
Should something happen to your website, say your site was hacked or your system crashed without any backup to get it back? You will have just left a lot of money down the drain–the entirety of the money you spent on web development, the one you would have lost during the downtime especially if your company’s major source of sales is your online presence. You will have also incurred the extra cost of paying another website development expert to build a website from scratch for you. All of this can be avoided if you employ the services of website maintenance professionals.
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Brand Image:
A company’s website is a large asset as it is a reflection of your brand image. Poorly maintained website with a lot of broken links, grammatical and typographical errors, dead pages, low speed throws a visitor off as soon as they arrive. It doesn’t speak well of your company and ruins your brand image. It is necessary to regularly review your site, identify these problems and fix them before customers point them out for you, especially the grammatical errors.
What is the cost of Website Maintenance?
The cost of maintaining a website is relative to the type of website, the quality of the work involved, and the website maintenance package you signed up for. At Oparawhite Global, we have various website maintenance packages that suit your needs and budget.
Conclusion
A properly maintained site attracts new customers and retains the interest of existing ones. Regularly review your customer contact points, ensure that they are working. Check your site’s loading speed, review the contents on your site, and try to see your site from the user’s perspective. All of these and more as written above when done by a team of professionals help to maintain a highly optimal website. At oparawhite global, we have a team of web maintenance professionals ready to deliver excellent service.
Meanwhile, please share your thoughts, how has regular website maintenance helped your business?
