Why a Website Maintenance Plan is Vital
If your business is a startup and you are a smaller to mid-sized company, and your company’s website just went live, you are probably under the impression that you won’t have to deal with it for quite a while. If you are under the impression you can just let your site sit there, and it will be fine, that would be a mistake. Just like a car or a home, a website takes regular maintenance. You would not ignore a leaky roof or a flat tire, neither can you ignore installing security updates and making sure your site does not become obsolete.
Unlike a car or a home website, maintenance isn’t a do it yourself prospect. You need the requisite education or training to ensure you are performing proper maintenance. In their first decade of existence, websites were just HTML, and it was easy to make adjustments. Website code is infinitely more complex than in those early days. If your company is a new or small business, perhaps both, it’s unlikely it has the means to hire an employee to oversee your website. The good news is that there are web design agencies that can help. Most agencies offer maintenance plans for your website. As you might expect, your website needs to run smoothly, and that is why a maintenance plan is essential.
A Website Maintenance Plan Means Your Site Works When it Should
Obviously, any company needs a site that runs smoothly; this is even more true if your business is an online e-commerce store. If someone visits your site and nothing works as it should you lose a customer forever. If they go through the process of finding an item to purchase, put it in their cart, and then not be able to make the purchase due to a faulty form at checkout, you not only lose a customer, but it hurts your brand. A website maintenance plan ensures that your website is tested regularly to prevent any problems that lose both customers and brand loyalty.
Be Secure
You have probably seen on the news stories about large companies or city governments which have been held hostage by ransomware. The hackers encrypt all the data in a system and won’t decrypt them until a ransom is paid. Because their security updates were out of date, the companies or cities had to pay the ransom. When security updates are not regularly installed, you leave your company wide-open to attack. In most cases, backups were not made, leaving them exposed to attack. When you have a website maintenance plan, it means that hackers can’t hold your site for ransom, and your data stays safe.
Optimize Your Site
A factor that Google and other search engine crawlers take into consideration when ranking websites are things like broken links, meta tags with not enough information, and site speeds that drag. All those issues will have a negative effect on your search engine optimization. When you have a website maintenance plan, it ensures your website performs its best. A website that functions well will, in turn, heighten your company’s SEO campaign. As a bonus, the agency managing your website maintenance can give you a summary of your site’s analytics, which will aid your marketing department to plan a more productive SEO campaign.
Lean on Me
If your website experiences any problems such as excessive downtime or a glitch that crashes your site, spending an hour on the phone, attempting and failing to get a solution can be maddening. A website maintenance plan takes care of problems before they occur, but it also provides swift support and resolutions. When your company has individual support, which makes fixing any problems a priority, it can give you peace of mind.
A website maintenance plan is an excellent way to ensure your website has no downtime. It functions without any issues all year long.
For more information on how Incend Media can help you contact us today.