Do you want to keep your website secure, up-to-date, and user-friendly? Then you need to maintain it regularly. In the following article, I will explore what are the main benefits of website maintenance and how it can positively impact your business reputation, conversions, and users’ satisfaction.
What is website maintenance?
Website maintenance is the process of keeping your website up-to-date and secure. It is an important task that can help improve your website’s security, SEO, and user experience. It includes various activities, such as performing regular site backups, fixing bugs that negatively impact user experience, troubleshooting issues, performing timely updates, identifying potential security threats, and taking actions to reduce the probability of website hacking.
Benefits of website maintenance
Website maintenance is essential for keeping your website running smoothly, minimizing downtime and preventing various problems with your site’s security, functionality, and up-to-dateness. Here are some of the benefits of website maintenance:
- Enhanced website security and overall site health
- Timely support and updates for your website
- Improved user experience and site functionality
- Regular backups for data safety
- Prompt resolution of all site issues and bugs
- Effective content management and timely updates
- Positive impact on conversion rates
- Reduction in costs associated with revenue loss due to downtime
- Strengthening your brand reputation
- Staying up-to-date with the latest technology changes and security challenges.
Let’s explore each of these website maintenance benefits and understand how they can be advantageous for your business.
Enhanced website security and overall site health
One of the most visible benefits of regular website maintenance is the reduced chance of a website getting hacked. Hacking can be devastating for all businesses and can incur significant costs to recover a website. Contrary to popular belief that large companies suffer the most from hacking, small businesses are a more frequent target of cyberattacks. This isn’t surprising, as small businesses have fewer resources and time to dedicate to securing their websites. Although security is crucial for companies, it’s also of immense importance for users. Insecure and hacked sites can lead to breaches of customer data and data theft.
Timely support and updates for your website
With monthly website support, all hosting, security, content, technical, and functionality issues can be addressed and solved in a timely manner. Timely content updates are important as they enable your business to provide accurate and timely information to its users. Timely addressing of all bugs reduces user complaints and positively impacts their engagement and conversions on the website. On the other side, timely technical website maintenance increase the website’s overall health and security.
Improved user experience and site functionality
Website maintenance also helps reduce users’ frustration on your website. Outdated websites can be filled with numerous navigation and usability bugs that hinder the opportunity to convert casual browsers into customers. Not only is the potential conversion lost, but it’s also less likely that a frustrated user will visit that site again. Website maintenance aids in keeping the website up-to-date by removing outdated code or plugins, simplifying website design, and creating a more intuitive, user-friendly website that is more likely to generate conversions.
Regular backups for data safety
In case your site gets hacked, the first course of action after cleaning the malicious files would be to activate the backup. This backup represents a complete copy of your site, including all files, databases, and content that are typically stored on the server. If you lack a backup and your site gets hacked, it could become a serious issue, as in some instances, all of your website data might be lost.
Furthermore, aside from hacking, you could encounter plugin conflicts, or your site might crash due to the latest core updates that might be incompatible with your website’s theme. Backups also prove useful in these scenarios. With them, you can retrieve the data from the backup created prior to those updates.
Prompt resolution of all site issues and bugs
With regular website maintenance, it’s easy to detect site issues and bugs, such as broken links, non-functional menus, problems with JavaScript, design inconsistencies, page speed issues, navigation problems, or other user interaction issues. As checking for these bugs is a component of monthly website maintenance services, this ensures that any website bugs will be promptly identified, addressed, and resolved.
Effective content management and timely updates
Content management and website updates become easier, as website maintenance services can promptly investigate all server issues that may lead to downtime. Additionally, working in the backend of your site becomes more manageable, as all the plugins will be up-to-date and tested for potential conflicts and bugs. Therefore, website maintenance makes it easier to focus solely on content.
Positive impact on conversion rates
We are already aware that a good user experience increases conversion rates. Through website maintenance, the detection of all bottlenecks on the website that contribute to bounce rates becomes straightforward. Occasionally, bounce rates are high due to content not aligning with user expectations. In other cases, users might experience frustration due to technical errors on the site, such as the checkout page failing to load on various devices or a non-functional menu on mobile. By identifying and addressing these types of issues, conversions are likely to increase.
Reduction in costs associated with revenue loss due to downtime
For every minute that your website experiences downtime due to hacking or server issues, you’re losing revenue from missed traffic and potential conversions. The average cost of a cyberattack has escalated from $34,000 to $200,000. Consequently, cyberattacks have grown more malicious and expensive for businesses. Website maintenance mitigates the risks of downtime, ensuring you don’t incur revenue losses from such interruptions.
Strengthening your brand reputation
One of the consequences of websites experiencing frequent downtime is the rapid erosion of reputation, leading users to be unlikely to revisit your site. Furthermore, ensuring website security is a necessity. This essentially entails having a properly installed SSL certificate, a firewall, conducting regular security checks, consistently updating your plugins, and frequently refreshing your login information, while also avoiding generic usernames like “admin”. With your monthly website maintenance package, you will get all this set up for you.
Staying up-to-date with the latest technology changes and security challenges
Technology is advancing rapidly, particularly in the realm of website platforms. Website themes receive updates, plugin bugs are patched, and new functionalities are introduced. Consequently, staying up-to-date is crucial; otherwise, your site’s functionality can swiftly become obsolete and subpar, and its security could be compromised. Through consistent monitoring of your plugins and theme, as well as thorough bug investigation, website maintenance assists you in achieving this objective.
How can Digital Search Hero help you with website maintenance?
Digital Search Hero offers both website management and SEO services. As an SEO specialist, I understand the significance of having an up-to-date and secure website for strengthening brand reputation, enhancing user experience, and driving revenue. I collaborate with web developers to facilitate the creation of secure and easily maintainable websites, thereby mitigating threats and addressing various bugs. I also assist in resolving technical SEO issues on WordPress and other platforms, leading to a well-maintained, user-optimized, and well-ranked website.