Your website is the foundation of your business online presence. People visit it to learn about your company, find your contact information and buy your products or services. Creating a website that looks great and functions well is important to any business, but that's only half the battle - maintenance is just as important. Your website maintenance ensures that your business, blog or online presence continues to evolve and succeed over time. It also establishes that anyone who interacts with your site will always have the best user experience. If your website isn't working properly or is out of date, you could be missing out on important opportunities like new leads and sales. Since 94% of first impressions are related to web design, people can leave a bad first impression of your business if your site is not up-to-date and functional. Additionally, if you are an ecommerce business and your ecommerce functionality fails, people won't be able to buy your products. Regular monthly website maintenance will keep your website up to date, safe to use and running smoothly. Failure to perform regular maintenance can leave your site vulnerable to hacks, bugs, and browser incompatibilities. The first reason to have a website maintenance service is for security. This is especially true if you're using an open source platform like WordPress. Because it is a widely used platform with lots of themes & plugins, it is particularly vulnerable to security issues. Their dedicated security plugins also require regular updates to stay safe.
If there are many tasks to consider when maintaining your website, organizing each one by week, month, quarter and year can help you to create a neat plan, leaving nothing unchecked and overlooked. To help you get started, we've put together this comprehensive guide to website maintenance, why it's important and how much it costs. A web design agency's responsibilities do not end when the development and designing for the client is complete. You also need to monitor websites for clients and make sure they are working properly. Selling website maintenance services to your clients is one of the best ways to generate significant revenue for your agency. As a web design agency owner, adding a recurring revenue stream to your business may not have occurred to you before. If you don't actively focus on this, you're missing out on a significant portion of potential cash flow. If you are looking to sell website maintenance packages to your clients and feel that adding a recurring revenue stream to your business is a good move. There are other types of recurring revenue models that can benefit your business. So, once you've finished designing your website maintenance package, you might as well consider them.
Your website is an investment and should be taken care of to a high standard. It needs to be continuously maintained, updated and optimized to perform at its optimum level. You will need a plan to allocate enough time, money and skills to maintain it. Here, we show you how a website maintenance plan can give your business site the high-quality support it needs to attract new clients or customers. Regular website maintenance is an important part of running a website that performs well on Google and encourages leads to convert into customers. But what is website maintenance? Do you need to hire a web design company? And can you do it yourself or must you partner with a site maintenance business? Let's get answers to all these.
Website maintenance means regularly checking your website for problems and errors and keeping it updated and relevant. It monitors the overall health and performance of your website. Keeping the website up to date is important to ensure that the website is working at its full potential, engaging and retaining site visitors. This should be done on a consistent basis to keep your website healthy, promote continued traffic growth and strengthen your SEO and Google rankings. Just like your home needs maintenance from time to time, your business website also needs regular maintenance. Website maintenance job is to regularly check in on your website and make sure everything is running smoothly. Regularly tuning-up your website eliminates the risk of downtime, keeps your site up to speed, prevents broken link stacks and many other benefits we'll explain in a moment. Essentially, website maintenance ensures that leads and customers visiting your site have a comfortable, fast and intuitive user experience, which encourages them to sign up, make purchases and return again in the future.
To ensure your website is a healthy and relevant state, you need to perform regular checks. Not once a year, not twice a year. We're talking about regular monitoring that will help you keep your business running smoothly and customers enjoying their user experience. Keeping a well maintained and attractive website is important for companies big and small to engage and retain customers. It's easy for businesses, especially startups to cut corners and let some tasks slide. Website maintenance can easily become one of those things because it doesn't always present an immediate problem.
Whether you are a large company, individual or small business owner, keeping your website up to date is essential. This allows you to engage and interact with customers and potential visitors to your site and prevents major issues with your site. Your website displays the face of your business. Your website's online presence is represented by your website. Your company details, testimonials, products and contact information are all there and people come looking for them. You can lose leads and sales if you have a dysfunctional website. Your first impression on your customers will be very wrong which is not beneficial for your business especially if it is an ecommerce website because people cannot deal with a faulty website.
Keeping your website up to date is essential, whether you are a large organization, individual or small business. It enables you to interact and connect with the target customers and potential guests on your website and prevents serious problems. And this is just the weekly assessment. Maintenance on a monthly basis includes reviewing your website's speed, performing security checks, evaluating website analytics and reviewing blogs that need updating. You should also consider upgrading the look of your website as well as evaluating your existing advertising and marketing activities. It's all about providing workload functionality to automate as much of the process as possible when it comes to website maintenance. This includes reviewing the backup health of your website and deploying it to various browsers to ensure it runs smoothly.
Now that almost everyone is taking their business online, there is a lot of competition. Your competitors are all scrambling to make sure their website ranks high on the search engines. How do you expect to stay ahead of your competition if you're not maximizing your return on investment and getting the most out of your website? You need to do regular website maintenance. Most website maintenance can be self-service but it is better to hire a website maintenance service to help you with it. This way, you can focus on growing your business and worry less about maintaining your website.
Activebit is a website design and development agency. This means that by working with us you can go from a concept to a fully functional website with a marketing company. Part of our services, whether you host with us or not, is regular web maintenance built into most of our flat rate contracts. A common question from potential clients is what is the purpose behind website maintenance. Here's an idea of what website maintenance is and why it's so important. Bellow are the website maintenance services
Updates are same strong functionality. No matter which CMS the website is using, you need to check if new updates have been released and then implement them. Script updates also play an important role. If you fail to run updates on the site regularly, there is a high chance of the website being exposed to hacks. If you use any kind of content management system like WordPress or any kind of script like PHP, it must always be up to date. WordPress usually updates automatically but there are some instances where it may need to be updated manually. Additionally, if you are using a website host, the web maintenance service provider will ensure that they are updating their main server software regularly. For example, it will check if the FTP service running on the server is up to date. However, if you run your own web server, they will manually test and apply updates.
An important part of website maintenance is keeping your website secure. Websites, especially those built on a content management system like WordPress, have a lot of moving parts. From themes to plugins to installed website security, updates are often made to patch security exploits. If your website stays with outdated systems, it remains vulnerable to active hackers, as well as malware and viruses. This is the single most important reason to keep website maintenance on your radar, especially if your website stores any kind of customer information. If you use a website building platform like WordPress or Wix, you need to make sure you install regular software updates and security patches. It can be easy and attractive for hackers to find and target websites that are inactive for a long time.
Even the biggest websites get hacked. The most publicized stories include defaced homepages, messages left by hackers and security compromises. There are many other security issues to be aware of. You might not realize it at first, but hackers can use many sneaky tactics to compromise your website. In some cases, hackers can access the backend and start using it as a spam server. This can slow your website down to a virtual crawl and eventually get the website blacklisted. Needless to say, this can prove to be a huge problem for website owners. Protection against the latest threats is an essential of any website maintenance services offered to customers.
Websites grow and attract new audiences when they are regularly updated with new content. Fresh and updated content on websites is loved by users and search engines. So review your content regularly, correct mistakes and upload new information in new style with targeted words. Google and all other search engines, pay attention to the quality of a content website uploads. Many website owners don't have time to update content regularly and you can fill that gap.
A business can delve deep into its website base but should not ignore it. Nurturing and maintaining a website is a simple key to a business's online success. Maintenance actually ensures the performance of the website by eliminating errors, security issues and providing the best user experience to the customers. Website owners can generate recurring revenue by offering content packages and updates to their clients, increasing their website rankings and improving engagement with traffic. Offering tailored SEO content is a no-brainer and will help you to increase your profits. Some of the best high converting landing pages regularly optimize their content.
Site monitoring is a term for a variety of activities conducted to test a website or web service for availability. Basically, it refers to any activity that checks the performance, availability and functionality of a web service or website. This may include automated testing or actual user monitoring. Manual testing is sporadic, while automated testing can be scheduled on a timely basis. This can be further expanded into categories, availability monitoring, performance monitoring.
Every link on your website should lead to the right place but sometimes links can be broken. A site or resource you previously linked to may disappear, a page on your website may become unavailable, or you may move a post and forget to update others linking to it. Ideally, a website maintenance service will check your website regularly to identify any broken links. As soon as they are found, they will either improve or remove them.
Data analysis involves gathering and evaluating traffic coverage and data on your website. A web development agency that provides recurring services ideally includes evaluating analytics and providing detailed reports to the client as part of the package. This is a winning situation for both parties, as your clients will also be able to understand how to improve engagement.
See your website from a visitor's perspective. If the processing speed is slow and the site has broken links, you will be irritated. However, a well maintained website with good web design and essential details will make you happy. After all, providing an excellent user experience is our top priority. Your visitors will be impressed with a good website, which will encourage them to use your products and services. Plus, they become brand advocates by recommending your brand to their family and friends.
As a business owner, having your website down means a potential loss of customers. For those who purchase a website without website maintenance, any sudden issues with the website should be handled separately and typically billed separately. This means calling your host and finding out why the website is down, trying to fix the problem yourself, or waiting on the phone for customer service to go to their chat room to help you to solve the problem. Website maintenance with our contracts means we'll fix any problem, even if it means waiting on hold with your host so you don't have to.
Having a website for automating the process of capturing leads and orders is an important component for your business, but are there gremlins lurking in your website that are preventing you from capturing leads or getting orders? From time to time, even the smoothest operating website can have errors in functional aspects or perhaps in your own internal fulfillment process. Regular maintenance and testing can help identify and minimize the impact of these problems and chase away the Gremlins. E-commerce is always evolving so your website needs to be in prime condition to stay on top, run safely, stay relevant and stay healthy. You want search engines to recommend you, and once customers land on your site, you want them to be fully aware that their transaction and information is secure so they happily type in their card details.
Your website is the first thing potential customers look for and at the same time, they're looking for relevant data, value and professionalism. This is where web maintenance comes into play. Regular updates with useful content will help your website attract and retain customers by maintaining a good search rank. Keeping our website maintenance checklist handy protects you against security, discoverability, technical issues. We understand the specific needs of e-commerce and keep your success in mind. There are a monthly checklist of tasks and tests that you can run to keep your site running smoothly and increase performance and sales.
1. Check whether the pages on your website load up quickly, and don’t display any errors.
2. Run a backup to ensure that the data on your website remains safe.
3. Update the software and plugins you are using on your site.
4. Check all the forms to ensure that they are running without a hitch.
5. Remove spam comments from posts or pages on your site.
6. Check the pages to ensure that there aren’t any broken links.
7. Look for 404 errors on your website and fix them.
8. Update your blog to engage your community and keep them coming back.
9. Manage their hosting accounts and make sure everything is going smoothly.
Website maintenance can affect your business first impression, SEO strategy, security and sales. Whether you own a business or create a blog, you want to make sure that when people and search engines land on your site, they immediately see the benefits of what your site has to offer or risk missing out. This means that your ability to retain and maintain online interest lies primarily in the maintenance of your website. As you read this blog further you will learn more about website maintenance, its requirements and what it does to your website. The ideas you gather will help you to understand your website better. The cost of services can also be found there.
To ensure your website is in a healthy and relevant state, you need to perform regular checks. Not once a year, not twice a year. We're talking about regular monitoring that will help you keep your business running smoothly and customers enjoying their user experience. Do you know how you regularly check your car for leaks and damage? Well, website maintenance is the process of checking whether your website is performing well or not. It's about keeping up with security updates, driving traffic growth and making sure Google is happy. In fact, website maintenance services are an essential factor in engaging and retaining your customers. We all know the difficulty of working on WordPress sites.
A well designed, informative and UX friendly website is the cornerstone of any successful business, especially online commerce. Creating a website and leaving it in the metaphorical forest is just one of the final steps. To stay relevant and functional, websites require regular maintenance. This guide will explain how you can ensure your website stays at the cutting edge of your industry, protecting your investment in its creation and protecting your brand's reputation.
Your website shows how professional you are. Visitors to your website can become potential customers if their experience with your website is impressive. If they get it wrong, they won't visit your website again. They would rather do business with someone else with a professional website. The perfection of your website shows how seriously you take your business. Grammatical or typing errors and irrelevant content can make customers lose interest in your website. It is important to keep your customers' interests in mind. Website maintenance comes with security and software updates that speed up your website and provide new features that can attract customers to your website. As the saying goes, you only have one chance to make a first impression, online businesses can make or break a deal depending on the initial look and feel of their website. If yours look outdated or doesn't work as it should, you may miss out on capturing new leads in the first few seconds.
If your website doesn't work properly or looks outdated, customers will often click away. This will set a negative first impression of your business. If your website looks unprofessional, customers will think you have a business too. Research shows that first impressions are 94% related to design. Using an attractive and updated web design can help you convey the right message to new site visitors. This reassures them that they have found what they are looking for and reinforces the relevance, credibility, trustworthiness and uniqueness of your site. As a result, searchers will find it in their best interest to stay on your web page.
Your website takes responsibility for directing your visitors to purchase your products and services. This ensures that your sales will increase. For an ecommerce website, transactions are an important part. If your website isn't working properly, transactions will fail and you'll lose valuable customers. If you want to do serious business, you need to have a well-functioning website. Moreover, people who shop online depend on quality images and the ability to zoom in on the product they check out in store. It's especially important that you offer images, videos or other visual support that can be done at any distance without physically putting on clothes or shoes. In addition to viewing images, customers want to get as much information as possible about their potential purchase, so you'll want to spend time writing product descriptions that testify to your business's reputation.
Sales are the lifeline of any online store. More people buying from your ecommerce site translates into a healthy and efficient business. To ensure that sales numbers remain high, you'll want to remove some of the technical hurdles that can hinder your customer's shopping experience. Some common ecommerce site issues include discounts and free shipping due to bugs or errors in product ordering, check out, and payment processes.
89% of customers prefer to do business with your competitors because of your website's poor user experience. The better the user experience of your website, the more customers you can retain. Selling your business depends on user experience. People will be willing to do business with you when the user experience of your website is impressive. If your website takes more than a few seconds to load, visitors will not stay and the bounce rate will increase. Customers with a poor user experience on a site, rather shop with a competitor. Regular maintenance prevents these poor user experiences and encourages potential customers to stay on your site, increasing your chances of making a sale. By regularly maintaining a website, you can avoid such unpleasant digital experiences. It's worth remembering that if your website user experience is optimized and well designed, your chances of making a sale increase with every website visitor.
A website maintenance plan helps protect your business from virtual threats. Regularly updating your security software and renewing your SSL certificate provider helps keep your site's files secure. It consists of sensitive information such as passwords and customers' private data such as credit card numbers and banking details. Bugs, hackers and cyber-attacks mean you're out of luck if you don't escape in time. They are threats to your website's security. They can sometimes crash your entire website and you have to rebuild the website. Your investment in building a website will be wasted.Your website contains a lot of sensitive information about your customers that should remain private. If your website is not secure, that information is also at risk. You will lose the trust of your customers and your website may face downtime. Developers who release these website updates are doing so to patch vulnerabilities they have discovered. When you keep your site secure, it's harder for hackers to compromise your business and easier for customers to entrust their financial assets to you.
Your website should have low bounce rate to get good search engine ranking. A customer leaving your website within seconds of arriving will increase the bounce rate which is bad for your Google ranking. Traffic to your website will eventually slow down. Other flaws that can hinder your search engine rankings are outdated website design, structure or content, security or technical issues, etc. Your website should always look updated because an old website may not rank well in search engines. If users are repeatedly leaving your website after landing on it, Google may see this as a sign that your site is not relevant. This increase in bounce rate can lead to lower rankings in search results, which means you will drive less traffic to your site. Constant technical issues, security issues and outdated website design, structure or content can all contribute to your search engine ranking decline.
Google wants to rank websites with the most relevant and up-to-date information on their search engine results page. They may completely de-index your website if it has not been updated recently enough and they suspect it is infected with malware. You should regularly update your website with current content, news, keywords and articles to rank well in search results. The whole point of starting a business is to have customers, clients or an audience. To drive traffic to your website, you need to update it regularly.
Just like first impressions, your business reputation is crucial to gaining customer trust. Some of the ways to maintain your online presence include having working links, adding a 404 page for broken ones, updating plugins, refreshing content and following the recommended page load time of less than two seconds. You need to ensure that your website lives up to your company's promise of quality, reliability and professionalism.
The Internet is always evolving & the industry standards that social media platforms, browsers, and other websites adhere to. You've probably heard. For example that SSL is becoming a required feature of browser and search engine experiences and not having it can harm how people view and find your website. Having SSL on your website is a great thing, but it is not a user friendly installation and if managed properly can be covered by the work under a regular maintenance contract. Ask yourself honestly if you are maintaining your website well and consider to contact us. One of the best ways to supplement your monthly income while providing something valuable to your existing clients is to offer website maintenance services. This will not only increase your sales but also help you to retain existing customers engaged. This will help your growth. It may require some initial investment, but as long as you have the big picture in mind, you'll be successful before you know it.
At Activebit, we offer reliable and affordable website maintenance services with no long-term contracts. We offer SEO, hosting, security and updates, support and peace of mind. We hope this article has helped you to see how important it is to include website maintenance services as part of your website design process and to keep your website healthy in the long run. Contact Activebit if you need a new website or upgrade your existing website. Apart from website design and construction, we can help you with custom web development services in Pune, as well as application maintenance and support and much more.
Comments (0)