The Importance of Website Maintenance

How important is website maintenance? Your website is more than just the digital landing page for your business. It is working 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Fifty-two weeks a year for your business and does more for the public face of your business than any other aspect. Keeping it running smoothly is a key to ensuring it not only runs smoothly but keeps working hard for your business. This blog will outline the benefits of a well-maintained website and what you need to do to keep it up to date.

6 Reasons To Keep Your Website Updated

Need reasons to justify why website maintenance is critical? Here are our top 6 reasons:

1. Shows the quality of your business:  A good quality website that is updated regularly will be problem-free for both you and your customers. This is the first step in building trust and showing the quality of your business. 
2. Protects your investment:  All websites are an investment for your business, both time and money. Protecting that investment is critical to prevent having to pay twice!
3. It has SEO benefits:  Google has many ranking factors, but how often your website is updated might only be one small part of it - but it is a ranking factor all the same!
4. Ensures good customer experience:  Customers will report that if a website is poorly designed or does not look secure, they will click away within seconds. A well-maintained website ensures no hiccups or issues that turn customers away. 
5. Helps with website performance:   Keeping an eye on your website metrics and performance issues is critical for your overall website performance for customers, SEO, etc. 
6. Ensures website security:  The damage that could be caused to your business if any customer data is breached could be catastrophic and could result in not only significant fines but irreparable damage to your reputation as a business. 

Combine those reasons, and you can see why website maintenance is so critical and less of a luxury and more of a must. All too often, we hear from website owners who need our help to repair the damage done by hackers or wonder why their site is not performing in the search engines, and one of the most common reasons comes down to how the site has been maintained. 

How To Keep Your Website Maintained

Now that is a "how long is a piece of string" question! There are so many different types of websites that operate on a varying range of Content Management Systems or are built differently. For this blog, we will assume that your website runs on a Content Management System - such as WordPress. 

• System & Plugin Updates:  At least twice a month, you need to make sure that all your core CMS files are updated correctly and plugins updated. 
• Backups:  Hourly, daily, weekly; however often you choose to do your backups, they are vital to get into the habit of performing and keeping at least one or two of them in case anything happens to your website. 
• Content Updates:  Blogs, service page updates, or just general freshening up of your content shows customers you are still active and search engines that your site is worth indexing. 
• Security Updates/Scans:   Perform security audits using third party tools or general security maintenance. 
• Clean-Up:  Old website files, images or blogs that are out of date could not only be affecting your website performance but could be affecting your SEO too. Keeping your site clean and free from old files will help resolve these issues. 

Some even deeper maintenance tasks can be undertaken that can help with SEO and could be picked up on SEO audits, but these should only really be done if you know what you are doing and will be covered in later blogs from E2E Micro. 

Should You Hire A Professional?

Running a business is hard. It takes lots of time, dedication and effort. Anything you can do to lighten your workload has to be a good thing, right? Outsourcing some of the most time consuming and technical tasks can be an excellent way to lighten your workload, and website maintenance is just one of those tasks. Outsourcing the maintenance of your website can free up time and resources that could be better spent doing other tasks for your business or your personal life. 

It boils down to 2 things when considering hiring a professional, what do you value more: the time or the cost and if you have the knowledge and skills to do what's needed. Hiring a professional frees up time and lets you know your website is in safe hands and all the tasks required will be completed on time and to the necessary level of expertise. 

Here at E2E, we are experts in small businesses and how they operate and here to take the strain from your shoulders when it comes to getting an online presence that works for you. We are a team of dedicated small business specialists who know precisely what it takes and have the tools, the skills and the passion for helping your business succeed online.