Website Maintenance: Everything You Need to Know

If you're a company, your website is at the center of it all. It's how prospective customers discover your business and what they learn about the services you provide. It's the place they decide they'll give you their hard-earned cash. Without proper website maintenance, your site could appear aged and not convey the most favorable impression of your company to its clients. More importantly, it could lead to security breaches, poor user experience, and loss of potential business.

In this blog, we'll explore the crucial aspects of website maintenance, empowering you to make informed decisions that will keep your website running efficiently and effectively in the future.

What is Website Maintenance?

Website maintenance is regularly maintaining your site to keep it running efficiently and current. It involves various tasks and actions to ensure your website is safe, user-friendly, and optimized for speed.

Website maintenance isn't a task reserved for web designers or programmers. It's a user-friendly process that anyone with a website can and should be involved in. Certain aspects of maintenance can be easily managed by website owners themselves, making it within their reach.

Although there aren't any absolute guidelines regarding the maintenance of websites, there are some crucial elements that need to be considered:

• Security Updates: Updating your website's security features is vital to safeguarding it from risks and vulnerabilities. This includes applying security updates, keeping your software current, and implementing strong security protocols to guard essential data.

• Bug Solutions: Finding and fixing any errors or issues within your website is essential for providing a seamless user experience. Regular testing, debugging, identifying, and swiftly fixing any problems help ensure your site's reliability and functionality.

• Performance Enhancements: Optimizing your site's performance is crucial to ensuring an enjoyable browsing experience for your users. This can include optimizing the code, compressing images, making browser caching possible, and enhancing response times to server requests, all of which can contribute to faster page loading and more fluid navigation.

• Making New Features Available: Keeping your site fresh and exciting is crucial to attracting and keeping visitors. Continuously adding new features and functions, such as interactive elements such as social media integration, advanced options for searching, or even a live chat feature, can increase users' engagement and ensure that your website is always up-to-date with the most recent developments and technology.

• Contact Form Test and Verify: Testing and verifying the form on your site is vital to ensuring effective communications with your visitors. A malfunctioning contact form can lead to missed opportunities and a negative user experience. Verifying that your contact form functions effectively allows users to reach you easily and increases engagement, as well as making it easier for you to respond swiftly to questions.

If you focus on these elements frequently, you can be sure that your website is error-free, secure, running at its peak, and offering visitors a pleasant experience.

Steps for Website Maintenance

These are steps you need to follow when you need to carry out routine maintenance for your website.

Backup Your Site

Before you begin tweaking your site, you should create an archive of the site in its current state to ensure that, should you accidentally make a mistake, you'll have a reliable backup to use. This is a crucial step often overlooked for site maintenance and is an excellent procedure for any business that can't afford major website-related issues (so that's everyone).

The standard guideline is to have at least three backups of your website in three locations. These backups can be saved on DVDs, CDs, or even drives. Three backups will save you if one or two backups become corrupted.

There's no need to search "How to backup my website." Whatever content management system or web builder you're using should offer you the option to back up your website before performing regular maintenance.

Check for Updates

Hosting providers regularly send out updates, but it's easy to forget them when managing an overwhelmed inbox and to-do list. These updates could be vital to security and performance, so it's essential to look for them and not let them get in the way.

After installing each update, check your website for a few minutes to see if nothing is broken. If it is, go back to your previous update and be grateful that you have it.

Dig Into the Analytics

Design and engaging content aren't worth much when your site doesn't assist you in achieving your primary KPIs. This is why we suggest looking into your analytics page for engagement metrics. If you do not see any negative trends, such as specific pages getting significant traffic. However, there aren't any conversions, and the average time spent on a page is not as long; this could indicate something is going wrong with your website. This could mean something is not working for the site's users.

Reviewing your analytics is an excellent first method for determining which pages should be improved. We do not recommend making changes to your site based on analytics data alone. However, examining how your pages perform in the back end will help you determine which pages you should examine more carefully.

If your site is using Google Analytics, make sure you've set up views and filters that help you decide which information to keep track of so that you can digest it easily. You can also personalize your reports to accurately reflect the information you're searching for by your objectives.

Don't Neglect Your Content

You should examine your posted content and review your website to see if it needs revision. If you've been producing blog posts for some time, you may have old content that needs to be rewritten. There may also be redundant content that could create internal competition and adversely impact your site's SEO.

It's not just about producing content that meets your readers' needs. It's about being proactive and strategic in evaluating the content you've previously published to ensure it's still relevant. Regular content audits can help ensure you have quality, helpful information on your site, enhance your nurture campaigns, and ultimately increase your website's conversion rate.

Conducting a content audit may be daunting. Sketching a strategy helps you and your team adhere to a plan and observe the outcomes.

• Prioritize: Determine your most popular pages with high priority first.

• Keep and combine, but eliminate: Identify which pages are appropriate to eliminate all at once (make sure that you don't link to them within other content), keep them as-is, or combine them to form a single article. This will decrease internal competition and ensure that outdated content is up-to-date.

Use Your Site as a Customer Would

This is the essence of website maintenance. You must think and act like a customer because you are trying to improve your user experience as much as possible. Navigating your website as a potential customer could help you spot any obstacles preventing you from making a sale.

Check out the forms on your website: Check each external and internal link to ensure you're not sending your visitors to the unwelcome "404 Not Found" page. After completing this quick review, go back to your homepage and test the experience from beginning to end for your primary performance metrics for conversion: demo requests, sales, or any other step. Does the process seem simple? Do you have enough information? Do you not provide sufficient details? If you view your site from a user's perspective, you can spot otherwise inaccessible issues and gain an advantage by staying ahead of the competition.

Perform Formal Usability Testing

Conducting this in your regular maintenance plan is unnecessary, but ensure you carry out an entire usability test once per year. It is best to have this task overseen by individuals not affiliated with your company since there's nothing better than an additional pair of eyes to spot apparent issues you might have missed.

Maintaining your website takes effort. It can be daunting and feel like a job lacking your expertise. However, investing time and proficiently performing website maintenance will result in a more prominent website to potential customers and an overall improved brand image. Make sure you prioritize maintenance on your website, and you'll be able to have a website that performs better but also offers an optimized user experience.

How To Calculate Website Maintenance Costs?

To calculate the cost of maintaining your website, you must carefully consider many factors to produce an efficient and sustainable budget. Here's how you do it:

• Review your needs: Start by identifying your site's unique maintenance needs. Consider factors such as the size of your website, the regularity of maintenance, security requirements, and SEO strategies.

• Make estimates for costs: Contact a website maintenance company, web developers, or freelancers for estimates for the maintenance services you need. In order to allocate your budget appropriately, you must distinguish between ongoing regular maintenance and ad-hoc costs.

• Consider the cost of software: When using Content management systems (CMS) or other software tools to manage websites, include their subscription or licensing fees in your calculations.

• In-house instead of outsourcing: Consider the expenses of having an in-house staff versus outsourcing to experts. Consider benefits, salary as well as training when you decide to go with an in-house method.

• Budget for growth: Websites change; therefore, planning for future feature expansions or enhancements is wise.

A clear maintenance program provides clarity, guarantees that resources are distributed effectively, and can help avoid unplanned expenses. Some examples of maintenance plans include:

• Basic plan: This includes the essentials, such as content updates and security patches, as well as weekly assessments, and costs between $100 and $500 per month.

• Plan intermediate: It provides additional content updates, regular SEO optimization, and further enhancements to functionality for between $500 and $1,000 per month.

• Advanced plan: Full services, including complex design adjustments, custom development, and deep SEO initiatives, cost over $1500 monthly.

A well-planned maintenance plan tailored to your site's needs will ensure that it runs efficiently and assist you in managing your budget over the long term.

Conclusion

By choosing professional web maintenance services, you can build a digital portal that inspires engagement, and boosts your company's success.

A properly maintained website is your greatest asset. It's the first link between your company and the world and your primary source of advertisement. You're missing the first important step if your site doesn't inspire users' trust.

Even though you might not want to invest in maintenance immediately (especially in the case of a new venture), having a solid, well-designed, friendly, and effective web presence will result in increased profits and improved user trust.