After you’ve launched your brand-new website, you celebrate and show your new site to all of your friends and family. However, you’re not done. Your website is never done. To keep your website successful and secure, you need to do regular maintenance. But why? In this post, I explain why your website is not done after you’ve launched it.
What is website maintenance?
You did not build your website just to show off to your friends and family. Your website has a purpose. Perhaps you want to sell products online or raise awareness about your local business. The launch of your website is the first step of your journey in the online world. After the launch of your website, you can do a lot of optimizing. Optimizing your website means that you tweak your website in such a way that it drives more traffic, makes more sales or improves your awareness even further.
Maintenance of your website is not that different from optimization. You tweak your site in such a way that your website will perform better. In maintenance, the emphasis is on maintaining all the functionality of your site, keeping the traffic on a consistent level and making sure that security remains optimal. Optimizing goes one step further than that. It tries to improve all of these things and maximize your outcome.
Why should you care about website maintenance?
Let’s look at four reasons why website maintenance is very important.
Security reasons
If you use WordPress (or any another CMS for that matter) you’ll need to maintain your website to keep it safe and secure. Every now and then, WordPress releases a security update that’ll make sure that hackers will not attack your website.
Next to WordPress itself, you should make sure to keep all of your plugins updated as well. These plugins also do software patches and security updates. Making sure that your site runs the on the latest versions of all the software you are using, protects your site against attacks from hackers.
Traffic and SEO
The second reason why you should care deeply about website maintenance is because keeping your website up to date will do wonders for your rankings in the search engines. Google loves and rewards sites that keep their information up to date. Editing blog posts to make sure to have the most recent information and examples in your posts is something that’ll help with your position in Google.
Make sure that the contact information and your opening hours are always up-to-date. That’ll do wonders for the amount of traffic you’ll attract to your website.
User experience
Google likes up-to-date and correct information, and so do your visitors. It is very annoying if you want to visit a bookstore, look up their opening hours online and still end up standing before a closed door. That’s a horrible experience it’s very likely that you will not visit that specific bookstore again.
If you are searching for information about how to get tickets for a certain concert, but you only find information about last year’s concert on a site, you’ll be annoyed. And you’ll probably not go back to that site again.
Making sure that the information on your website is up-to-date is very important to your visitors. It has the information is correct and up-to-date, that’ll give a reliable vibe to your site. People will trust your website and with that, your product and services more.
Performance
The fourth and final reason why website maintenance is important is because it will keep the performance of your website on a nice level. As your website matures and perhaps gets bigger because of the content you’re adding, you want to make sure that the performance remains optimal.
You want your site speed to be fast. You want the loading speed of the pages to be short. Pictures and image size should be optimized, and you want to make sure that your site remains responsive. Next to that, you also want to check and fix your broken links.
How to get started
It might not be the most exciting thing on your to-do-list, but maintaining your website should definitely be on it. If your business has a website, that website needs to be maintained. Not every website needs the same amount of maintenance, but every site needs some love to keep attracting visitors.
Making sure all of your plugins are updated, and you’re running the very latest version of WordPress would probably be the most logical first step in website maintenance. Checking the content of your contact information, opening hours and about us page also make sense.
Remember that website maintenance is a never-ending process. Set reminders for yourself and work on your website regularly. Make sure it becomes part of your routine. You clean up your house regularly and make sure that everything around the house is in good shape, right? Same goes for your website!