Hey!
We all know the importance of having a well-structured website. To keep your website up and running is not enough. Regularly updating and doing regular maintenance monthly and annually is crucial to ensuring that your site is well maintained and running at full capacity.
So we thought we’d address and review why it is important to regularly maintain your domain site in this article per month or annually.
Investing in a site is like buying a car, you get more value by following a website maintenance plan and implementing software updates with the tools at your disposable.
It Improves Security
Website Security is the number one reason why regular website maintenance per month is important – and the primary problem that often makes news headlines. It doesn’t matter if your business’ website or blog is on WordPress or some other platform, if it uses many plug-ins or not, or if you have an online website store – hackers around the globe are always searching for a vulnerability and preventing security breaches before they happen is essential.
When your business uses WordPress (which we, at Web Delegate, recommend) or a similar content management system (CMS), it’s important to make sure that you are always running the most up-to-date version and have backups. This ensures that WordPress’ latest bug fixes and patches are updated on your website.
Sure, some hackers want to go for a “big hit” and steal tens of thousands of credit card numbers or passwords, but most don’t. In fact, lots of hacks occur where malware or a Trojan Horse is uploaded to your website. This causes problems not just for you, but potentially for every person who visits your website too. How do hackers get in? They exploit the weaknesses in the website’s outdated software and security patches. Just like a thief will look for an unlocked door or an ineffective security system, hackers actively seek out old websites because they are easier targets. When your website is down, it might lead to downtime for your business or even lost revenue for an e commerce website.
We can’t say it enough times, making sure you have a website maintenance plan or website maintenance service is so important. Delegate your website maintenance tasks and ensure that there are backups to support your business in times of need.
Want to improve your website? Take a look at our Website design package for small business.
Optimize User Experience
If your website’s theme and template files are old and outdated, they may not display properly on new versions of web browsers and mobile devices, maybe resulting in 404 errors as well. This will affect user experience. But, when you perform regular updates per month, you can be sure that the most current version has been installed and is working properly on your website.
In addition to making sure your website displays correctly, you also want to keep your website maintained to make sure the user experience monthly is fresh, exciting and relevant. Also, sometimes when your website domain name is hacked, in our maintenance package, we will help to reboot your website.
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It Boost Monthly Website Traffic
In order to provide searchers with the best quality content, search engines raise monthly rankings for website that are updated regularly. A higher monthly ranking increases your site’s visibility, which increases the likelihood that your content appears when your target audiences search for relevant keywords. Updating your website with valuable information, fixing broken links, removing duplicate pages, and keeping your content updated with content marketing will help drive both new and returning website visitors.
Usually, website maintenance goes hand in hand with your SEO Strategy. or marketing campaigns such as Google Pay Per Click or Facebook Ads.
It Backs Up Your Essential Files And Materials
We all know that your website is your marketing tool. You might have been running Google Adwords or Facebook campaigns that lands on your website. Having a back up and enabling it to restore back to the previous version is critical as you are losing ad money. This is why having a website maintenance package is important.
It will also save you time and effort if you are to redo the website again with another website vendor.
So… What sort of website maintenance or website maintenance services do I require for my website?
The answer to this varies from website to website. It depends on how extensive, how large is your website and generally how important is the website to your business. Generally, in 2021, most corporate or ecommerce websites have some website maintenance services engaged with their website vendor. This is in part to enhance security and also to assist the company when they start on their marketing plans. As mentioned above, website maintenance will help you in your website search engine ranking which enhances your overall digital marketing strategy.
Majority of websites would require small tasks that involves website design and web development. This are the minor fixes to the website, security updates, software updates , web design, fixing broken links, solving your 404 error pages, content upload and bug fixes.
A quotation on website maintenance services or website maintenance packages can be found in here. Most companies charge customers on a per hour or per month basis.
How much Does Website Maintenance Cost?
Monthly website maintenance cost varies from vendor to vendor. A large portion of website maintenance cost is in the wages of the staff that works on the website maintenance for the website. A good web design company will have a comprehensive plan and team to maintain your sight or website maintenance services that will be sufficient for their clients.
If you are reading this in Singapore, a fair rate for website maintenance cost will be somewhere in between $200-$300 per month website maintenance that is charged by most website vendor, or it can be charged per year. Again, for ecommerce websites, it tend to be more expensive to do website maintenance as compared to a typical corporate website.
As you scout around for website maintenance packages you can take a look at our Web Delegate Maintenance Package as part of your consideration.
You can also take a look at the breakdown of the tasks and also the FAQs For Web Delegate Website Maintenance.
Can I do Web Maintenance On My Own?
As with most things, you can most definitely learn website maintenance or web maintenance on your own. One of our favourite reference link is written by Sharp Hue and we recommend to check it out. It is doable with the tools available.
However, most clients would rather take up a website maintenance package because they would rather spend their time on digital marketing efforts (SEO) or even to run the business. It will be more valuable use of time than doing web maintenance and web agencies will have the tools available to support the maintaining of your websites and meet your website needs.
Also given that website maintenance is pretty mundane, most customers end up like the image below.
Why Are More And More Companies Doing Website Maintenance?
As companies start to digitalise, their website becomes more important in how a customer will perceive them. From our recent experience, web design customers no longer just want an informational website. They want their websites to be able to generate leads or help them in optimising their current work process i.e. ecommerce. There is a huge emphasis on digital marketing and using the website to generate leads for the company. For SMEs around the world, digital marketing is usually the #1 method for most companies to generate sales.
Hence, with the importance of website to a company, more companies are seeing their website as a storefront or a marketing channel to their prospects and customers. Naturally, website maintenance services are in great demand.
This is also accelerated by the global pandemic in 2020 where there was a great shift in consumers moving online.
In Conclusion
Companies engage website maintenance services for a variety of reasons and depending on the scale of their website. If you are interested to be marketing and to scale up your online presence, website maintenance is crucial in your success and a maintained website makes sure it is running smoothly.
On the same note, having an attractive website to illustrate what you provide is also important. Feel free to take a look on our other article on how much should web design cost, which includes the costs of hosting and services.
If you are looking for a web design and development company that can take your website global? Feel free to contact us today to get started.
