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Website maintenance is one of the most common things you will need as a website owner. In the post Covid19 world, more and more people will be searching for your company information online and is important to ensure good website maintenance to upkeep your constantly evolving brand image on search engines.
Here are some of the top questions that you may have on website maintenance packages:
1. What Are Web Maintenance Services?
Web maintenance services are essentially regularly checking your website for updates, bugs, issues that could potentially lead to detrimental result for your website on search engines. Having a website maintenance package and website maintenance plan will ensure that your website is smooth and running so that you can focus on your business.
But what are you required to do for website Maintenance?
2. What Do You Do For Website Maintenance?
There is always a checklist of items on a website maintenance plan to be done to ensure the website is running smoothly. Here are some of the maintenance tasks that we do for our customer on our hosting and maintenance packages.
To be done on a weekly basis
- Check that all of your pages are loading without errors
- Run a backup and make sure a previous version of your site is stored
- Make updates to website software and plugins through both software updates and security updates
- Check that all of your forms are running properly
- Remove spam comments from pages and posts
- Check your pages to see if there are any broken links
- Search for 404 errors and fix or redirect
- Write one or more blog posts to keep your community engaged with fresh content to encourage SEO traffic.
To be done on a monthly basis
- Check the load speed of your website and ensure that nothing is bogging it down
- Review your security scans and make sure nothing is out of place for a secure website
- Analyze website statistics from the previous month
- Check your local search visibility.
- Check your blog to see if there are any articles with outdated content that could be updated
To be done on a quarterly basis
- Review your website design and structure – can be it improved?
- Check graphics and images – should anything be updated?
- Review SEO and meta titles and descriptions to ensure they are as effective as possible
- Test and tweak popups, forms, and calls to action on web pages
- Review your workload for efficiencies to see if anything can be automated
- Test your website on all devices and browsers to see if it displays correctly and there are no broken links
- Review advertising and marketing campaigns to see if anything needs to be changed or updated
- Restore a previous version of the website to check your backup health
To be done on a yearly basis
- Update any reference to the current year
- Check your website for 404 errors and if there are any, fix or 301 redirect them.
- Review each page for content accuracy, grammar, typos, and relevancy
- Check any active email addresses and see if any are excessive and can be deleted
- Ensure that your website domain name is renewed
- Consider whether website design theme updates are due
- Review all of your top performing blog articles and see if they can be updated with new content
These are the things part of website maintenance services that need to be done to ensure your website stays up to date.
Want to improve your website? Take a look at our Website design package for small business or ecommerce solution for small business in Singapore.
3. So Why Do You Need Website Maintenance Services?
There are a few reasons why you need website maintenance services. We will go through them
The majority of customers or prospects will look for your website
Before making a purchase online, 87% of people conduct online research. People that are considering buying a product from you will likely end up on your website.
If your website gives them a negative impression of your company, possibly from a breach of customer data, they’ll likely continue their research on your competitor’s site, and you could miss out on a sale. This is the importance of security patches.
It’s your company’s impression
It’s becoming more and more simple to create a website that looks well-designed and professional. There is an expectation for a professional website from professional companies. If your website doesn’t deliver on the promise of professionalism, your customers will often go elsewhere.
In this post covid19 world, people are making decisions based on what they see or read online. Hence, having a fast and up to date website with regular monitoring through a web maintenance service is more important.
Piece of mind & focus on running the business
Ever heard or experience the time when a website got hacked? Website Maintenance packages will prevent the likelihood of this and should it happen, there is always a team of professionals that can assist you with this. This is one of the main reasons our customer sign the website maintenance package with us.
Avoid Losing Revenue
When your website is visited by web users, users who have a poor user experience on a site, 89% will shop with a competitor instead. Regular website maintenance services prevents these poor user experiences and helps retain customers, encouraging them to stay on your site, increasing your chances of closing the deal and preventing potential customers from going to a competitor. This will help with google rankings and retains an online presence on a search engine.
Website Needs To Be Regularly Updated
In the post covid19 world, it is important to start seeing your website as a marketing tool for a search engine. Digital marketing has slowly replaced traditional marketing efforts and the website is your basis for your marketing efforts. You want to ensure that it is working fine and there are no hiccups or issues with the website, having regular backups.
4. How Much Does Website Maintenance Cost And What Are Other Website Costs To Consider?
Here are 3 more things to consider for your website. The cost of website is relatively cheap nowadays but almost every serious player in your industry has it. Thus, it is even more important to be investing into digital marketing efforts such Search Engine Optimization or Facebook Ads or Google Pay Per Click.
But before go on to read this, it really depends on how extensive you want to move into this digital age. The cost will definitely go up as you invest further into digital marketing. However, think about the returns on your investment as you are likely to reach out to more people and digital is where people are searching these days.
If you feel the cost is too high? think about how much it will cost if you are doing traditional marketing like print ads, newspaper ads, shop rental etc.
Domain Name Renewal
When you created your website, you purchased a domain name, which is your website’s address. For example, our domain is Webdelegate.com
You might pay for your domain name on a monthly or yearly basis. Domain name typically cost between $20-$30/year.
It is important to pay on time as a late payment will cause the website to crash and be offline. This might affect your sales.
Website Hosting
Website hosting is another website maintenance cost to consider. It is usually paid on a monthly or yearly plan. There is no market rate when it comes to hosting. It all depends on the features and for companies without a tech team, it is better to have a team of professionals looking after your website.
When it comes to website hosting providers, you have several options.
- With a shared hosting provider, your website shares a web server with several other websites. It’s the least expensive hosting service but it is also the least recommended one.
- Website builders like Wix or Squarespace are user-friendly and cost between $60 and $180 per year. However, the cost balloons with each year and you have no control over the source code.
- If you choose a virtual private server (VPS), you still share a server with other sites. However, the provider divides the server up into several VPSs, giving your site a dedicated amount of server space. VPSs cost $240 to $600 per year.
- With a dedicated server, you get full access to your own server. This option costs between $1200 and $24,000 per year.
The prices above are just a gauge and it differs from vendor to vendor. If you are looking for a hassle free solution, you can get one of our hosting/maintenance packages on Webdelegate.com
5. Can I Do It Myself?
Yes sure you can it yourself. However, the same principle applies for alot of things. You can also clean the house on your own and you don’t have to hire a maid or cleaner. Being a running business, we believe it would be best to hire a professional to handle the site’s performance through performance monitoring while you keep your business running smoothly and make your business grow. Here are also 2 other options you can consider for routine maintenance.
Hire A Variety Of Freelancers
If you are looking to build your business, you can get freelancers or a web developer to help you maintain your websites through code customization. The up side is that the price for the regular maintenance is more cost effective than others but the stability might not be there.
Hire A Website Maintenance Company
This will be the most common way for SMEs in Singapore. Most companies will delegate this work to their web development company. Prices varies from vendor to vendor but it is typically in the range of a few hundred dollars per month inclusive of the hosting cost.
6. What About My Ecommerce Website?
It is even more critical if you are running a ecommerce website to have basic website maintenance. The simple reason is that the website is generating you money and every downtime will affect your sales.
In fact for most ecommerce websites they are running alot of marketing software as well as Google Adwords or Facebooks Ads. Typically, you would need a tech team to support you for your website if not usually you can consider a more enhance website support packages such as Web Delegate Hosting Max.
7. Why Can’t I just Contact You When My Website Is Down?
This is generally the start of most conflict between vendor and customer. At this juncture when your website, be it a wordpress website or wix website as a few examples, is down, you will feel that you are being held ransom by the vendor. Also, the vendor knowing that it is going to be a one time fee, they will just charge a price that they feel is profitable for them to come in to fix it.
Either way, it is not good for building trust between vendor and client. It is hard to set a fee up front as the vendor is unlikely to know what the issue is going to be in the future.
The key point of website maintenance is that you have someone contactable to ensure your website is well maintained while you focus on marketing of relevant content, operations and sales. That is the main reasons why our customers sign website maintenance packages with us.
8. Does Website Maintenance Help In My SEO Efforts?
Yes it definitely helps in your SEO strategy and efforts on mainstream browsers. In website maintenance, one of the items that vendor will usually do is website speed optimization for browser compatibility. This element greatly affects the SEO ranking for your website. Also, a faster website will give better user experience which means more people are likely to consider hiring or contacting you for your services.
Still Thinking About Digitalisaing Your Business?
You can looking into our Web Delegate Products for a start if you are a small business.
If you are looking for an agency and in house team to support you and maintain your websites, check out our Web Delegate Maintenance Package
Are you looking for a web design and development company that can take your website global? If so, contact us today to get started.
