If you want to get the best results, your website cannot simply run on autopilot. Effective, well-running websites get a lot of TLC from their owners—or the managed IT teams tasked with their care.
Setting up your website is just the first step. After that, you have to do updates, check for issues, and monitor its health and performance on a monthly basis. Otherwise, your site could fail to meet your expectations and even end up letting your customers down.
Want to learn more about why you need to invest in better website maintenance? Here’s a look at the top five ways you’ll benefit from maintaining your site.
Keeps Your Site Live
Your website can only stay up and running if you regularly run the updates as they come out. If your WordPress software, theme, or plug-ins end up out of date, your site could end up going offline until everything gets fixed.
As with most things, preventing your website from going down is much easier than fixing problems that occur due to a lack of updates. You just need to run your updates as they’re released for the best results. A monthly check-in is usually enough to ensure that you get all the updates on time, actively keeping your site live and ready to serve your customers.
Reduces Security Risks
Your website is at risk of viruses and other cyberattacks whenever any of its systems end up out of date. Even plug-ins can increase the vulnerability of your website when they’re left without critical updates.
If a virus affects your website, your visitors could end up with malware on their computers, keeping them from coming back. Fixing a virus on your website can prove time-consuming at best, too, especially if you’re not inexperienced in tracking down and resolving the problem. Ideally, you should aim to avoid that scenario altogether by keeping your site up to date at all times.
Builds Trust in Your Brand
A well-maintained website helps your brand build customer trust and loyalty with every visit. In order to engage with your target audience, you need a website that acts as a reliable online resource. Your site should provide all the info people need about your products and services—and without any hiccups along the way.
If your site has broken links, slow load times, or viruses, trust erodes fast, sending your visitors zooming over to your competitors’ websites. To avoid that, make sure your website maintenance procedure includes a thorough health check, followed by troubleshooting to solve any problems you find.
Promotes SEO Success
You can have all the right keywords and semantically related phrases in all the optimal places and still lose on the SEO front if your website doesn’t perform as expected. Technical SEO is just as important as on-page elements, after all, when it comes to ranking at the top of the results for all your main keywords.
Your website needs to load fast, maintain an optimal structure, and operate at its best to send the right message to web crawlers. If anything is amiss, the algorithm will undoubtedly change how your site ranks—and it could stay that way long after you apply all the right fixes. Website maintenance prevents that from happening, preserving all the hard work you put into your on-page SEO.
Saves Time and Money
Whenever your website goes down, you have to race to fix it or risk harm to your business reputation and revenues. On top of that, you may need to pay for countless hours of troubleshooting and repairs to get your site back online and working at its best.
By investing in website maintenance from the start, you can avoid that and save yourself lots of time and money. The maintenance process typically takes very little time and effort each month, especially if you outsource that service to a managed IT company. You can then rest assured that your site is in good hands and will continue to support your business success for years to come.
Ready to Create the Perfect Website Maintenance Plan?
When you make website maintenance a top priority, all the benefits above will come your way. You just have to stay on top of it month after month to keep your website working at its very best.
If you’re worried about how you’ll put all that time into maintaining your site, look to our team at Fastech Solutions for support. We’re your premier provider of managed IT solutions, including website creation and maintenance services.
