Having a unique, great-looking & highly functional website is essential for every industry, but that’s just half the critical part of the necessary action—website maintenance is just as essential.
Maintaining a website assures that your brand, blog, or digital presence keeps on evolving and succeeding over the course of time. It also authorizes that any user who communicates with your website will constantly have the best UX.
Whereas there are several tasks to be considered when managing a website, handling each and everything according to week, quarter, and year could help you create a surefire plan.
While there are a number of regular website maintenance tasks to be considered, organizing each task by week, month, quarter, and year can help you build a foolproof plan, leaving without being unnoticed or unchecked.
To help you start out, our experts in web design services have compiled this comprehensive guide on what is website maintenance, what website maintenance includes website maintenance costs, what website maintenance plan is, why website maintenance is important, and much more.
Let’s start!
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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 correctly.
Simply put, it is the act of regularly checking your website for issues and keeping it updated and relevant.
Website maintenance services are an essential ingredient for engaging and retaining your audience.
In the next section, we’ll cover various types of web maintenance that must be carried out periodically.
As discussed earlier, once you launch a website, it's crucial to do regular website maintenance tasks in order to avoid any technical problems, enhance UX, and make sure that your website ranks higher in SERPs.
Maintaining a website can be daunting, but keeping your website functioning smoothly is crucial. Here are some of the different kinds of monthly website maintenance tasks that one must be aware of
To deal with vulnerabilities in the software, web development companies regularly release security patches. Security patches are essential in keeping your website safe from cyber attackers; therefore, deploying them as instantly as they’re available is necessary.
To improve the functionality of your website, plugins and themes are helpful. However, just like other software, they are also required to be up to date to assure high-level compatibility with advanced web technologies such as browsers and security updates.
It's essential to keep your website's content up to date to ensure that it is pertinent and accurate. It includes adding blog posts, improving product descriptions, and discarding outdated content. Because obsolete content can make your website look outdated and unprofessional and can deter prospective customers.
Keeping the latest backup of your site is crucial in case something wrong happens. Disaster recovery planning helps assure that you can swiftly get your website back up and running in case of significant issues.
A data backup helps to avoid data loss and makes sure that you can reinstate your website when it gets corrupted or hacked.
monitoring your website’s performance helps identify potential issues and take measures to keep your website functioning smoothly. Improving website performance helps in improving the speed and responsiveness of your website.
It involves the task of enhancing the page load time, optimizing images, and minimizing the code.
When maintaining a website, it's crucial to perform security checks or security scanning to make sure that the website is safe from any prospective threats. Frequently scanning a website can discover and resolve security issues before any damage. This helps secure both the website and visitors from possible damage.
Security scanning also helps improve the UX. by discovering and resolving possible security vulnerabilities; visitors can be guaranteed to keep their confidential information secure when using the website.
It's crucial to manage your website user’s account, including creating and removing user accounts, regenerating the password, and handling permissions. It also includes eliminating user lists by deleting spam accounts.
Testing website accessibility helps to make sure that your website is safe and that anyone can use it. This includes disabled people, mobile phone users, and people with low internet speed.
It is vital to make sure that your website is available whenever visitors try to access it. The aim is to maintain your website’s uptime almost close to 100%. So, when your website gets down, you need to take the required steps to get it up and running.
It’s essential to monitor your website’s SEO using SEO audit steps to make sure that it ranks higher on the SERPs. It also includes monitoring the website’s ranking, linking, and web traffic. SEO monitoring also helps in identifying possible issues and ways to fix them. You can also track your website’s progress over a period of time and evaluate success.
Among the most important ways to make sure that your website is up to date every time is to take up a support and maintenance plan. This kind of web maintenance plan often includes all of the aforementioned services. Also, other crucial services like website hosting, SSL certificate, email support, etc.
Now, without further ado, let’s explore more about the website maintenance plan.
A website maintenance plan is a premium service to keep the website 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, themes, backups, and site monitoring sometimes.
It can also offer any or all of these services.
Let’s find out the average web maintenance costs
Website Maintenance Cost
The average e-commerce website maintenance service cost ranges from approximately $50 to $200/month. But having said that the real cost will rely on the size and intricacies of your website as well on no. of web pages that are required to be upgraded regularly.
“Website maintenance services mainly consist of tasks like web updates, security patches, website performance monitoring, backups, etc. These web maintenance services help your website run smoothly and provide positive UX”
It's possible to technically handle web maintenance on your own, but despite that, it's best to hire professional web design services like JanBask Digital Design, for it. Because maintaining a website could be a technical, daunting, and time-consuming task. And small mistakes can lead to expenses in the course of time.
Therefore when planning for a web design and development budget, as a website owner you must budget for website maintenance costs. Thus, by adding website maintenance costs in your budget from the beginning, it's possible to prevent any unforeseen costs down the line.
Also, website maintenance costs could add up over a period of time, they’re often a low price to be paid for tranquility, which comes with the understanding that your website is up to date all the time and working swiftly.
“Are you finding it difficult to budget for website maintenance, a best thumb rule is to keep aside 1 to 2 % of your total web design and development budget? For instance, if your web design & development budget is $10,000, you must set aside $100 to $200/month for web maintenance.”
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 website 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 like JanBask Digital Design 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 by a professional team. Again, it’s up to you to decide on which solution works best for your business and its website.
How frequently should you perform website maintenance depends upon the size and intricacies of your website and how frequently you update it. Generally, it’s best practice to perform website maintenance one time each month minimum, but can be performed more frequently. This will ensure that your website is constantly updated and works smoothly.
Few of the other activities such as website uptime monitoring, security scanning, etc., could be automatized in order that those tasks are completed periodically. Having said that, other regular website maintenance tasks like web updates, website performance monitoring, website speed optimization, etc are required to be carried out manually.
You can set security, plugin, and theme updates to auto updates on the CMS. If not, these updates should be scheduled with the help of webmasters, in order to keep the website secure.
Periodically updating the web content keeps the content appropriate, useful, and compelling for the visitors. The webmaster should assure that your web content is up to date on a constant basis, at least every month.
The task of creating and maintaining user accounts could be laborious, specifically if your site has several users. Therefore, as discussed earlier, it's best to hire experts to manage these tasks on your behalf.
In spite of that, if you choose to do it yourself, ensure that you have a system for handling passwords and permissions.
It's also important to check your website’s accessibility to make sure that everyone can access it. It includes disabled people, smartphone users, and people with slow internet connections. Various paid and free web accessibility tools are available in the market which you can use to test your site’s accessibility.
Furthermore, monitor the uptime of your website periodically to make sure that it's available when visitors attempt to use it. You can use paid and free uptime measuring tools for this task.
Additionally, it's essential to monitor SEO of your website, to make sure that your website is visible in search engines; which includes tracking website ranking, backlinks, increased web traffic and much more.
Although it's possible to perform web maintenance on your own, it's beneficial to hire a professional for this job.
Let’s find out why website maintenance is important?
Having a proper website maintenance plan assures that your website will be doing well as one of your most valuable marketing tools. Here is a complete checklist of regular website maintenance tasks to keep your website working great for website visitors and to keep you ahead of the competition.
Before You Begin
At this time of the year, go through renewal for the website domain name, web hosting service, and any extra tools you are using for website maintenance such as paid Analytics or keyword research tools.
A few other elements of your website like header, footer, or legal policy might need special attention at this instant.
Ensure that all the content is up to date and that major menu categories represent what’s most important for your organization. Check for old company logos and images that might not serve your intention. Thereafter, redesigning a website might benefit your website.
Review your web content on the basis of aims, objectives. Goals and metrics like search engine optimization, user behavior, user engagement, and sales. At this stage, you can ask yourself a few questions such as,” Are all my meta titles and descriptions SEO-friendly?” “Is the blog getting desired traffic?” and “What should I update in my web content, according to topic and links?” All these questions are related to performance.
Next, go further by twisting your content, trying out CTA’s across your website, and checking whether your website’s content displays accurately, on both fronts - visually and textually, on all types of web browsers and devices.
Find out whether all your digital platforms are secure, plugins and themes are up to date, and web content is backed up. It’ll help you prevent misplacing any key information and protect your website against cyber threats.
You must also check website speed using tools like PageSpeed Insights which provides details regarding website functions on various browsers and devices. After doing a website analysis, it’ll then provide recommendations for making your site faster.
Using Google Analytics you can analyze information related to how visitors are coming to your site and engaging with it. You can also perform weekly web maintenance checks by signing in to Google Analytics and tracking website traffic, etc. Thus you can find out your website’s performance and areas of improvement.
Website-related data like the total no. of website visitors, bounce rate, etc. can help you in making improved decisions for your website. Furthermore, this analysis tool helps you find keywords and intent of the visitors, their geographical location, interests, etc.
These are the regular website maintenance tasks that you need to do regularly to ensure regular maintenance functions well and provides your site visitors with a positive experience. Now, let’s talk about how many website maintenance costs on average.
Web maintenance is essential because of several reasons, most significant being that it keeps your website working smoothly. There are few other reasons too, like keeping your website fresh and upgraded, making sure that visitors get the best UX whenever they visit your website and improving your SEO ranking.
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 maintenance in more detail:
The whole point of running a business is to have customers, clients, or increasing website traffic.
Google regularly analyses 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.
User experience is vital if you want to achieve a higher conversion rate. Regular website maintenance can help pinpoint issues users may have on your website that prevents them from completing certain tasks.
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.
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, which 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.
The better your site is, the more you will be able to convince 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.
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.
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 and improving website performance.
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.
Let’s check regular website maintenance tasks or what does website maintenance include? in the following section.
If you as a website owner are thinking how to undertake website maintenance tasks, then, we’re sharing plethora of options:
Certainly, one of the best way to cut down web maintenance cost is to manage them on your own. But having said that, even though you’ll save money, it is important to invest more time, if you wish to continue along this path.
DIY web maintenance is highly beneficial for website owners who run personal blogs or portfolios that doesn’t require to handle too many website maintenance tasks in the first place.
Employing freelancers that are expertise in various areas like content development, website development, technical support, etc. could be an excellent choice. Hiring freelancers is quite a cost-effective option, but inspire of that, it needs a lot of communication, which could lead to downside.
Employing a website design and maintenance company will certainly help in reducing plenty of stress off your shoulders. A majority of website maintenance companies are available to assist their customers in keeping their websites up and running, updated and secure.
As a website owner you can rest assured that your website will be properly looked after by website maintenance companies.
Finding a suitable website support and maintenance services is crucial for the success of your website as well as business. Therefore, its important for you to make sure that you choose a credible web maintenance company who knows what they are doing and has the required experience in keeping your website up and running.
Here’s the short list of things you must look for in a website maintenance and support services:
Furthermore, its vital to lookout for signs that makes you feel that the company isn’t the best suited for your business needs. Be aware of these red flags:
If the web maintenance company isn’t straightforward regarding its service cost, you might need to rethink! Finding out that additional work was accomplished subsequently and got charged unknowingly is a red flag.
Any well-known website maintenance company needs to have a portfolio of work they’ve accomplished for earlier customers. If the web design and maintenance company doesn’t have anything to showcase their success rate, its an sign that they might not have satisfied customers.
A website support and maintenance services must provide you access to the back end of your website, as ultimately, you must be able to comprehend what modifications they’ve made and how those modifications can impact your website performance.
If a website maintenance and support services refuses to give you access to your website, its important to update security settings and lookout for one of the well-stimmed website maintenance companies that’ll help you in enhancing your website.
1. What are some issues related to website maintenance?
There are several reasons that can cause financial loss for both small and large organizations, and few of them are quite similar. Here are some of the most common website problems that can cost businesses big.
2. How often does a website need maintenance?
Generally speaking, it is best to do website maintenance at least once in a month, but if possible it can be done more frequently. It’ll help to ensure that your site is updated and functions smoothly.
3. How do I manage website maintenance?
Maintaining a website is a task that involves frequently checking your website for different issues or mistakes and keeping it up-to-date and compatible. It should be performed on a regular basis so as to keep your website safe and secure and drive consistent traffic, provide positive UX, and foster SEO rankings.
At 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 already have a lot of things to take care of. It's a fact that website maintenance is an ongoing task, but it does not have to be so intimidating.
Consider website maintenance as 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!
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