Introduction
Finally, you have got your website up and running! Now, you might be thinking that you can now relax and watch the leads, business inquiries, and sales roll in. Alas! This is not how it works.
Building a website and unleashing it into the digital world is just stage one of the eventual processes. Owning a website is a commitment that needs ongoing maintenance to keep everything properly updated to run smoothly.
There are a lot of tasks ahead, which include a combination of activities ranging from simple design updates to security precautions and regular backups. As most sites work on a content management system, an outdated site can be easily attacked by hackers, placing the customers and business at risk. According to WordFence, the popular CMS WordPress has over 90,978 attacks happening each minute.
Website maintenance is vital to keep your site relevant and functional and a site that is ignored is likely to be penalized. Here is a comprehensive guide on the basics of website maintenance, its significance, and what does web maintenance includes so you can ensure that your website remains at the cutting edge of your industry, protecting your investment in its creation – and your brand reputation.
What Is Website Maintenance?
Website maintenance refers to a set of tasks required to keep your site functioning at an optimum level. It is about keeping up with security updates, encouraging traffic growth, and making sure the site is working properly.
It is the act of regularly checking your site for issues and keeping it updated and relevant.
Website maintenance services are an essential ingredient for engaging and retaining your audience.
What Is a Website Maintenance Plan?
A website maintenance plan is a premium service to keep the site up-to-date. It requires more in-depth work than most people can make time for or know how to do it properly. This ongoing service generally covers the website’s code, plugins, and themes and even backups and site monitoring sometimes.
It can also offer any or all of these services.
Website Maintenance Tasks for Yearly, Quarterly, Monthly, and Daily
Having a proper website maintenance plan assures that your site will be doing well as one of your most valuable marketing tools. Here is a complete checklist of tasks to keep your site working great for website visitors and to keep you ahead of the competition.
Before Your Begin
- Install Google Analytics on your website
- Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and connect with your site
- Take a backup service and make sure to set up database backups. In the next step, store these on a separate web server.
- To monitor website security with automatic scanning get software for security.
- Get a plugin to monitor website uptime.
Website Maintenance Tasks for Yearly
- Update the copyright date in the footer and other references
- Renew your domain name
- Review each page for content accuracy, relevancy, grammar, and typos, and make changes accordingly
- Update your website strategy to align with your current business goals
- Check any active email address and see if it is excessive and can be deleted
- Review if the website design update is due
- Also, check to go through all your top-performing blog pages and see if they can be updated with new content for a better ranking
Website Maintenance Tasks for Quarterly
- Go through your website design and structure properly, if they need any kind of improvements
- Also, check for any room for content enhancements
- Test and modify forms and automated messages to make your conversion rates better.
- Make sure this automatically integrates with your content management.
- Check the meta descriptions and titles to ensure they are aligned with the current SEO practices.
- Review your site to check that it looks and displays in a proper way on popular web browsers and mobile devices
- Go through your site’s architecture and try to come up with ideas on how you can optimize them
Website Maintenance Tasks for Monthly
- Check your website loading speed and figure out if there is anything that is slowing it down
- Analysis of your site reporting through Google Analytics and monitor the website traffic, bounce rate, track form submissions orders, etc.
- Review site statistics to find- which is your most popular content? Which is your least popular content? Where are visitors coming from? And tweak your content to suit
- Check for error pages that your users may be seeing on your site. A quick check each month will help you to sport and fix those URLs right away
- Add some fresh content to your site to keep it relevant and your site visitors engaged
- Review the security scans and try to fix if there are any issues
- Check your local search visibility
Website Maintenance Tasks for Weekly
- Check that all of your pages are loading properly and there are no errors
- Check for 404 errors and if there are any, fix them
- Run a backup and before that ensure you have a previous version of the site
- Review whether all forms are working smoothly
- Review your site’s navigation weekly to check broken links and fix them
- Update all your website software and plugins
- Check for spam comments on your pages and posts
- Review and resolve any issues with emails sent from the server
- Write at least one blog content in a week at least to engage your clients and boost SEO traffic
These are the site maintenance tasks that you need to do regularly to ensure regular maintenance functions well and provide your site visitors with a positive experience. Now, let’s talk about how much site maintenance costs on average.
Wondering How Much Does Website Maintenance Cost?
- Include Domain and Hosting Charges
- Include SSL Certificate
- Include Cost for Content and Design Update
- Technical Support
How Much Does Website Maintenance Cost?
Source - stocktwits.com
Website maintenance cost often goes unplanned but is critical for making sure that your site runs efficiently and reliably. There are different cost expectations depending on what your site is used for, the size of your audience, complexity, functionality of your site, and how much content is hosted.
Here is the breakdown of the approx cost of maintaining a website:
- Domain name – $8.27–$29.99/ year.
- SSL certificates – $0- $150/month.
- Web hosting providers – $3–$100/month.
- CMS update – $20–$200/ month
- Tech support – $0- $1,000/month.
- Search engine optimization – $0- $800/month.
- Content updates – $0 – $3,000 total.
- General updates – $0- $200/month.
There are a number of factors that can affect the cost of site maintenance.
- The number of services affects the overall cost of the site. A company that only offers to host and security patches will be a lot cheaper than one that is also doing your SEO and site development.
- Another important factor is the size of your site may affect how much you pay. Maintaining a website with thousands of pages and sophisticated functionality will be more expensive than updating a 5-10 page Wix site.
- The type of size matters a lot. An eCommerce site needs strong maintenance and robust security. On the other size, a brick-and-mortar store with no online ordering can get by with basic security.
These are the typical costs of website maintenance and updates.
While some enjoy the challenge of maintaining a website themselves, especially big organizations do so by hiring an in-house team, many business sites choose this task to a professional company.
Well, all these options are great to go but hiring and training an in-house team, especially for site maintenance causes a lot of money, time, and effort. While going for a freelancer may sound like an affordable option, the only problem with freelancers is that they lack professionalism. Here going for a website maintenance agency is the most suitable option, they know exactly what to look for and will nip potential problems in the bud with a minimum of fuss.
Where you do not have to take stress about training people and you will be catered from a professional team. Again, it’s up to you to decide on which solution works best for your business and its website.
Why is it Important to do Website Maintenance?
As eyes are windows to your soul, in the same way, websites are windows to your business. When customers land on your site, they look for something that can present you as a professional business. A professional business that offers something of value. With regular site updates and maintenance, you will be able to attract and retain customers provide quality content, and maintain search engine rankings. Here are the most important benefits of the website maintains in more detail:
SEO Outcomes
The whole point of running a business is to have customers, clients, or an audience.
Google regularly analyzes your site and checks for keyword optimization, the site’s structure, and organization as well as site errors. If Google crawls your site and finds duplicate pages, poorly done redirects, and errors pages, it will badly affect your SEO ranking. Your site will rank poorly on search engines. Driving traffic to your site is the lifeline for your business, so making sure everything is perfectly optimized is a must.
Customer Experience
User experience is vital if you want to achieve a higher conversion rate. Routine website maintenance can help pinpoint issues users may have on your website that prevents them from completing certain tasks. Maybe your site is not optimized for mobile phones or an outdated plug-in is an issue.
Security
Security is the single most important reason to keep website maintenance on your radar especially if your site stores any form of customer data.
Every year, cyberattacks cost U.S companies $15.4 million. Repairing the damage caused due to cyberattacks is costly, in addition, you may lose customers who no longer trust your organization with their personal information.
Regular website maintenance helps in protecting your website from cyber threats keeping your security at the best level. When you focus on security protection, customers feel confident making purchases on your website.
Cost Saving
The ultimate goal of any business is to generate revenue. Without it, you cannot manage your company and pay your employees. Well, what if we tell you that not focusing on website maintenance services can result in a huge loss.
Did you know that 77% of users said that they do not try to access a site if they see a 404 error? 47% of visitors want a website to load in 2 seconds.
If your website experiences continuous downtimes, people will immediately leave your site means a loss of customers. If you wish to grow your business, you cannot afford to lose revenue.
A well-maintained website works like a customer magnet. With the proper content management and updated security protocols, you can easily manage to take your online sales high. When your visitors will get all the information they need about business, you will see a great enhancement in the revenue.
Latest Trends in Design & Technology
The better your site is, the more you will be able to convenience your potential customers that you are a good choice. When you focus on your website maintenance and stay on top of it, you get the opportunity to be an early adopter of new site technology that will help the back-end run smoothly.
If you are updating software regularly, you will be able to utilize the benefits of its latest features that install along with the updates.
Stay Updated
Digital media is evolving rapidly. Every day, new plugins, features, and designs are introduced to the market. Keeping up with these new releases is almost mandatory for your site to remain healthy and relevant.
If you do not take website maintenance seriously and your site is not updated frequently, you are risking losing customers and even worse, inviting hackers. Hackers can easily take control of outdated websites.
Focus on Your Business
Website maintenance is a time-consuming task. It takes a lot from analyzing your security scans and testing your site loading speed to updating your plugins.
When you will get time for focusing on your business. When you will work on your business strategy. Well, here getting a professional web maintenance service can help you, and you will have plenty of time to run your business.
With a small investment, you can save yourself from spending hours fixing a website issue. You can leave the task to the professionals and spend that time working on something that you love and have the skills for.
It is a fact that you cannot be an expert in everything and also you do not have to do everything for yourself. Invest in the maintenance of your site because this is the only road to success.
Final Word
At the first stance, web maintenance may seem like a never-ending struggle that has to be dealt with constantly. You might be wondering right now how you are going to keep your website well maintained when you have already a lot of things to take care of. It’s fact that Website maintenance is an ongoing task, but it does not have to be so intimidating.
Consider website maintenance one of the essential parts of your SEO plan, and it should be treated as such.
Having a proper website maintenance plan helps improve your website performance, keeps it secure, and helps you gain more leads and sales. While you can manage the website maintenance yourself, working with a professional website maintenance company can help you make sure you cover all your bases.
If you have any questions about this topic, feel free to let us know in the comment section below!
Looking for Website Maintenance Services?
- Enjoy Robust Security
- Latest Upgrades
- Protect Your Digital Assets
- Free from Coding Errors
D
Such an amazing post on Website Maintenance! Every site beginner should visit this post. This is quite helpful. Looking forward to more posts.
C
The above guide on Website Maintenance is just Wow! Being a digital professional I always try to learn something new. Thanks for sharing this post!
D
It’s a really good article on Website Maintenance. I got all my answers about this particular topic after going to your post. Thanks a lot for sharing this blog.
F
This is a perfect way to explain Website Maintenance. I was looking for such an amazing post from the last few days, but could not find one. Fortunately, I could go through this post and got so much information on ad marketing. Thank you!
E
Wow..!! This Website Maintenance guidance is really helpful to understand its importance and what it includes. This is really very helpful!
L
Thanks for sharing this information about WordPress Maintenance. A lot of people really want to know more about this and its benefits. so I’m really happy that I got to find your site before using it.
C
I found your blog on Website Maintenance today and it is very well written. Keep up the good work & share more about such interesting posts.
M
Hey, Thanks for this comprehensive guide, for sharing content, and for such nice information for me. I hope you will share some more content about it. Please keep sharing such posts!
H
Such an interesting post! Very well explained, very understanding with so many tips and techniques on WordPress Maintenance.
O
Thank you so much for sharing all this wonderful info.
J
Thanks for your feedback!
F
Thanks for your blog. I really like your idea to get rid of all the clutter around the home during this time so that it’s easier to manage.I love your point to clean in sections so that the area is totally done before moving on to the next.
J
Thank you Finch!