Maintaining your site

As is true with most things with many working parts, your website is no different - a maintenance contract for your website is good insurance that it will be up to date with software upgrades and secure.  We offer various levels of maintenance contracts based on how much ongoing service our staff will need to provide.  It could be as simple as adding some links or a few photos to your site to more complex tasks like implementing a monthly newsletter, managing content, or updating an online calendar.

With our intimate knowledge of your site, you can be assured that we would be best suited to maintain your site in the most efficient manner possible.

What is Website Maintenance and Why You Need It

If you have a brick and mortar business, you know all about the amount of work it takes to maintain your place. You know that the floors need to be cleaned, your windows washed, light bulb replaced, leaks patched, desks and chairs fixed or replaced, etc … the list goes on and on. What happens if you don’t take care of the issues right away? The problems get bigger, your employees become unhappy, and the customer… well… they just don’t return. So you know that maintaining your place of business, whether it’s a restaurant or an office, needs to be kept clean, organized, updated and free of issues.

Although your virtual presence does not necessarily have physical parts, it too needs just as much attention and maintenance as your brick and mortar counterpart.

Here are 5 reasons for creating a maintenance program for your business website:

1. Fresh Content

Why do great restaurants have different specials each week? They want to keep people interested and coming back week after week. So unless your restaurant is located in a Senior’s Home (no offense), your customers want new and exciting things to try and taste.  And even cafeterias in Senior Homes change their menu from time to time to keep things exciting,

For your online business presence, make sure you’re giving your readers a reason to come back.  No one wants to read the same content week after week or be looking at outdated information about an event that happened 3 months ago. If you’re not updating, you're essentially telling your potential customers that you are not paying attention to your business or you may even be giving them an impression that you may be going out of business.

2. Website Speed

Have you ever found yourself in a situation when you just want to look something up “fast”? Your friend, your wife, your boss or whomever is standing next to you, and you just want to find a quick answer to a question or look up the location of the place, or quickly find that reference number.  And because you’re a resourceful modern age individual, you look it up on the internet. You get your result, but alas, the page you clicked on is not loading in, it taking really long, the darn circle keeps swirling and nothing.  In the end you go to a different site that does load-in fast and without issues.

Your business website is usually the first point of customer interaction, so you need to leave the visitors with a positive lasting impression. There may be a whole host of reasons why your pages may not be loading fast. Slow pages can happen at any time and the only way you’d know there is an issue is if you’ve got regularly planned maintenance on your site.

3. Website Backup

Anyone who has ever had their work or sensitive data crash on them should appreciate this. Technology sometimes fails us, so having your website and all of the files, photos, updates, posts, pages, etc, backed-up on regular basis can prove to be ‘business-saving’.

You have to remember that your website resides on a server.  Hopefully you are with a reputable company that has many fail-proof systems and backup options. However, even if you are with the best hosting service out there, sometimes their systems can fail. When your data is gone you have no recourse, unless of course you have done the responsible thing and have been getting everything backed up on regular basis. Backing up your website is just smart and easy way to protect yourself and your business.

4. System and Plug-in Updates

Have you ever known technology to stand still? Did you ever buy a piece of hardware only to find out that a week later a new better device is available? So why would you assume that your website code or the platform would be always the same.  The software, just like the hardware is constantly being updated and improved, and if your website is not keeping up with the updates you’re falling behind.

The reason for the constant updates is to not only keep up with the latest hardware requirements, but also to keep up with the new coding requirements.  Also the plugin you downloaded last week may have had a bug and if you don’t install the new update, it may mess with your entire site. In some cases your entire site may cease to work properly unless you update the platform. In addition, search giants, such as Google, may not allow your site to be listed unless it conforms to the latest programming requirements.

5. Measure and Improve

Measuring and improving the success of your business website is very often overlooked by business owners. But how else do you know if your efforts are having an impact?

Search engines give your websites and your web pages scores (marks), which determine your search position. As we all know from our years at school, good ranking is rewarded to those who not only work at it consistently but also to those who do the right things. To make things a little more complicated, search engines like Google, are constantly changing their requirements of what it takes to be at the top. Believe me, the websites that show up at the top of the organic searches didn’t get there by accident.  It takes work and dedication.

The first step is knowing where you stand and try to improve each area little by little.  Once you’re at the top, the work doesn’t stop. If anything it gets harder to stay there, since there are millions of websites clambering and trying everything in their power to be #1.

Bottom line is that Website Maintenance is very often overlooked, but it’s a simple and inexpensive insurance policy for your online business.