Your new website is finally launched. Time to kick back and relax, right? Unfortunately, it’s not that easy.
The moment your gleaming new site goes live, various forces are already starting to pick away at it. Hackers poke at your infrastructure. Updates bob around, promising to make things better, yet often failing to do so. Forms and links which once worked perfectly start sputtering. The truth is, without a website maintenance service plan, your website will inevitably start to suffer. Eventually, so will your profits. Below are 3 reasons why regular site maintenance is a smart idea.
Protect yourself from cyberattacks
Phishing, ransomware, Trojan horses: The modern hacker has no shortage of tools to make your life a living, er, heck. And according to Forbes, over 30,000 websites are hacked every day—meaning any website owner is at risk. Since many hacking attempts take advantage of outdated plugins and other inconsistencies, a website maintenance service can help greatly decrease your risk.
Keep your rankings in search engines
If your website is slow and outdated—or peppered with broken links and error pages—the Google gods notice, and are not impressed. To put it more technically, when search engine spiders crawl your site, they take a tally of any broken links, missing images, and 404 errors. If they conclude that your site is inferior to its better-maintained neighbors, you’ll be lowered on results pages, and customers who would have seen your offerings first will see your competitors’ instead.
Impress your customers
These days, your website is your business. If your website functions poorly, your visitors will assume that your business runs poorly, too. And when it comes time to make that crucial purchasing decision, they’ll take their money elsewhere. To win customers and keep them coming back, it’s crucial to schedule regular site maintenance so that everything is running as it should be.
Make changes incrementally
Of course, not all updates are for security purposes; some are just plain fun. Many updates promise to add jazzy new features to your site that can keep your user experience fresh and engaging.
However, if you make 10 months’ worth of updates at the same time, it can have seriously negative consequences. Firstly, your regular users will experience a dramatic change in what they’ve come to expect, which can cause frustration and loss of sales. And secondly, in the words of one of our developers, “A website is like a car engine—you don’t want to just throw a bunch of stuff in there without thinking about how it all works together.” If you make gradual updates on a regular, scheduled basis, you’ll experience less problems all around.
Why a website maintenance service is good for business
When you make a small investment in site maintenance, your business benefits in multiple ways. You diminish the chance of security breaches; impress your visitors; elevate your search engine rankings; and make sure that changes happen at an even pace. It’s a win-win-win all around, for just a small percentage of what you’d have to pay to fix an issue like a crash.
If you’re just learning about website maintenance, and would like to get started, you might consider Red Letter Marketing’s OverSite™ website maintenance service. OverSite goes beyond automated tools and software. Instead, our real, live human developers will personally inspect your site once a month and scan for any glitches and errors. We’ll shoulder the burden of your site maintenance so that you can focus on running your business. To learn more, give us a call.
