Here’s Why Website Maintenance Is A Lot Like Servicing Your Vehicle – It MATTERS!

Jerry Wallis
11 min read

Just because websites don’t have oil, tyres or water doesn’t mean they don’t need regular and consistent maintenance! Yet, because an outdated plugin posing serious website security and fraud vulnerabilities is nowhere near as obvious in everyday life as a cracked windscreen, leaking radiator or bald tyres, website maintenance is often neglected and overlooked.

The state of your own digital world speaks volumes about your products or services and even your entire company. As digitalisation has taken over the whole market, maintaining an excellent digital presence requires significant and consistent effort. In other words, this effort is what’s often called “digital space maintenance.”

While social media platforms are popular, the leading digital real estate you own and can control is your own website in most cases. Social media platforms come and go. Sadly, it isn’t uncommon to hear of people and businesses losing their entire business overnight due to relying on social media, who have then shut them down due to a minor policy violation issue.

To be sure, you need to invest first in your own website! What makes you significant and stand out from others is how you portray and maintain your own virtual space. For these reasons alone, for every website, besides creating and launching one, it is essential to develop and maintain it.

For instance, if your website visitors are landing on broken links, 404 warnings, and other kinds of serious errors, they will bounce off your website — and most likely not return. Yes, their first visit might turn out to be their last.

To prevent this from being the case for you, your website should be updated promptly with the latest technology updates and engaging content. From the newest catalogue news and product articles to price list changes, company activity changes should be quickly reflected on its web pages. It ensures your prospects and customers learn and are educated about your latest products or services even before trying them. They will gradually become more trusting of you as an authority figure and rely on you more and more because of the effort you put into your website.

What Is Website Maintenance? 🧑🏿‍🔧

Website maintenance is the process of verifying that your website is fully optimised and functioning at the highest level without any faults, glitches, or other technical difficulties. It’s also about keeping up with security updates and newer content, driving traffic growth, and ensuring your website visitors are happy and engaged with what you have to offer.

Website maintenance can also be described as a tool that tells you if your website is functioning to its full capacity. Unfortunately, a considerable percentage of websites on the internet lose their effectiveness, attractiveness, and most importantly, relevance within a few months of their launch. You might point your fingers at the technical incompetence of these websites — but in most cases, it’s always the lack of sustained website maintenance.

Avoid these costly pitfalls by maintaining your website regularly. But remember that whilst it is possible, maintaining your website yourself can be very much like servicing your vehicle. You might succeed with a lot of effort and learning curve pain, but it’s better to be left in the hands of professionals who know what they are doing and have the tools and experience to do this work every day.

If budget and resources permit, you should hire software development agencies to maintain websites. They will help you update and maintain your site routinely, without you worrying about the nitty-gritty of technical issues.

Why Is Website Maintenance Crucial? 🗝️

Website maintenance is essential to stay relevant in the digital space. However, its importance has a larger scope. Let’s discuss some of them below.

  • It keeps your website protected and secure.

Hackers are constantly looking for security holes — vulnerable websites that can be exploited and breached. To avoid being hacked, your website must be maintained so that bugs can be found and promptly fixed.

Likewise, with regularly maintaining your website, you can spot the vulnerabilities in your website and work on them before anything is breached. With proper security measures, your audience will feel secure, and so will their information stored in your website’s cloud storage.

Website maintenance also allows you to keep your website’s software up-to-date and install available security patches that will help you remove infections and threats if the site is affected in any way.

  • It ensures you have a reliable backup source for your website framework, database, and content.

You can have a reliable backup if your system crashes or something happens to your website’s source program by setting up and following timely website maintenance. It’s easier to restore from a working backup than rebuild your website from scratch.

Thus, website maintenance teams typically create a backup of two website elements: the source code (Javascript, PHP, HTML, and CSS) with every update, and the website’s core content — such as text, images, and audio-video files. A backup is necessary to prevent the loss of data, files, and plugins.

  • It means your website is compatible with new technology and trends.

The internet is continually evolving, with new approaches, trends, and technologies being developed and improved user experience. As a result, your website must constantly examine the latest technology and algorithm compatibility.

Also, to stay relevant, your website must be customised following the market trends that consumers have adopted. Your website can still stand out while following the trend by being creative. This allows your website to not only impress your regular viewers but new ones as well.

Likewise, with timely maintenance, allowing your viewers to enjoy a mobile-friendly version will positively affect your progress. These days, people are more active on their mobile phones than on any other platform; therefore, making your website convenient is a way to succeed. So website maintenance is the key.

  • It ensures your website visitors and customers have a better user experience.

It is seen that effective website maintenance results in increased lead generation and conversion rates. So why hold back? If you want your viewers to rely on your website, maintaining the site ensures that.

Your website must match the expectations of your visitors. This means initiatives to improve user experience and eventually convert them to leads ought to be implemented. A broken website adversely reflects your brand image, which might not disappoint your regular viewers but negatively impact the new ones.

Website maintenance can thus assist you in resolving technical issues such as page loading errors, broken links, poor grammar, spelling errors, and other problems that may come afterwards.

  • It allows you to accurately monitor your position in the digital space.

Maintenance is monitoring. And when you are constantly keeping track of your website, you get a good feel of where you stand among your competitors. Unless you know your position, you will never be able to out-compete others, and the same applies to your website as well.

Therefore, website maintenance is also a tool for self-reflection.

  • It ensures that your content is updated regularly.

There are two aspects to web maintenance: standard practices and content updates. What is often deemed as maintenance plans typically don’t include content creation and updates — whilst it is absolutely the best practice to do so.

Thus, the web content must be updated regularly through routine website maintenance so that your website visitors can keep coming back. Moreover, website maintenance allows you to improve your content quality, identify keywords and phrases (better SEO performance), attract new website visitors, and ultimately generate more leads and increase conversion rates.

Regularly updating content makes your website more interactive and helps it rank higher in internet searches, which is a win-win.

  • It enables you to quickly announce new products and services.

Although this falls under the rubric of content update, the benefit is significant. New products and services are launched every day globally, and with the tool of affiliate marketing, websites advertise these new products right away!

You get a website that doesn’t lag or glitch with website maintenance. As a result, the moment you post the announcement or review of the new products or services, viewers get a better experience reading those reviews than other competitive websites.

What Happens If You Don’t Maintain Your Website? 💥

Now that you know the importance of website maintenance let’s run you through some consequences of failing to maintain your website.

  • Your website will decay — technically and non-technically. It will have glitches, the performance will suffer, and the viewers will be frustrated with the same look and poor user experience.
  • Your lead conversions and rankings will tank due to the experience your viewers will have on your site. A poor experience will result in poor performance — and that’s a fact!
  • Your website will be vulnerable, and hackers will (not might) take full advantage of it. Cyber scams are more prevalent today than ever before.
  • Your website will lose relevance with search engine rankings since the content isn’t updated regularly.

Why Might You Hire a Website Maintenance Team? 🤝

Whilst you can maintain your own website, it’s often more productive and efficient to delegate this technical type of work to those who are experts in the field of web security and maintenance. They are more experienced, have higher competency levels, and can do what needs to be done faster. You don’t have to worry about your website’s health and security as the work to maintain it continues in the background.

Since time and knowledge constraints can make this task difficult, it is often a better use of resources to let a professional team work on maintaining your website. You can then focus on other pressing issues such as content generation, market analysis, and everyday business activities, to name a few.

Here are three reasons why you should hire a website maintenance team:

  • Instead of worrying about the maintenance and security of your website, you are free to focus on the things you are good at, including the critical business activities such as product development, marketing, selling and servicing your customers. 
  • Upon completing their task, you can also get feedback from your core members. Moreover, as they’ll have seen the entirety of your website, their feedback will be the best you’ll ever get.
  • Most website maintenance teams have monthly packages that you can choose from according to your budget and need.

How Much Does It Cost To Maintain Your Website Regularly? 💵

Depending on the type of website, the maintenance costs vary, although here are some monthly ballpark estimates;

👉 Small business website maintenance may cost up to $100/month

👉 A corporate website may have maintenance costs of $200 to $3,500/month

👉 Large e-commerce website maintenance costs may range from $1,500 to $2,500/month

There are also additional (and often overlooked) costs such as web hosting, domain renewal and secure socket level (SSL) certification fees which you need to take into account as well. These might range from $20 to $125 per month, and while some agencies may choose to sell these products and services with a margin, at WEBO Digital — whilst we fully support and provide guidance — we insist our clients own their accounts for these essential aspects of your website. You can read more about why we do it this way in the following article we wrote here👈

Professional web maintenance teams will test your whole website regularly, check compatibility across different browsers, ensure that forms and checkout processes are functioning correctly, check for software and plugin updates, back up your website, and review the key metrics. Maintenance plans also include additional support resources, allowing you to have minor changes and updates according to your business needs.

Conclusion 🏁

Maintaining a website is a lot like servicing your vehicle. If it isn’t done according to the manufacturer’s recommendations and specifications, the vehicle will eventually break down and end up costing you more than a routine servicing schedule. The efficiency of your vehicle — or the website — will also be significantly reduced.

Thus, website maintenance will secure your website and improve its overall performance to a greater extent. It’s a no-brainer that technology doesn’t stop evolving, including keeping sites secure. That’s why regular backups should be made as well as testing their redundancy to ensure that your most important asset is accessible and quick to re-deploy — should the worst happen and your website does go down.

Above all, a solid web maintenance plan will keep your website relevant and attract new traffic with each post you create or repurpose. We hope we have explained this topic well enough so you can see why it makes sense to consider website maintenance a significant issue and something undoubtedly worth investing in for the long term.

👉If you would like more information or want to discuss your situation regarding website maintenance, please send us a message so that we can get back to you.

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Published On

January 03, 2022