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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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 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.
Different Types of Web Maintenance
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 website maintenance tasks that one must be aware of
1. Security Updates
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.
2. Updating Plugins & Themes
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.
3. Updating Contents
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.
4. Backup & Disaster Recovery
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.
5. Monitoring Website Performance & Optimization
Monitoring your website’s performance helps identify potential issues and take measures to keep your website functioning smoothly. Optimizing 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.
6. Scanning Security
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.
7. User Management
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.
8. Accessibility Testing
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.
9. Website Uptime Monitoring
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.
10. SEO Monitoring
It’s essential to monitor your website’s SEO 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.
11. Support & Web Maintenance Plan
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.
What Is a 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 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 carry out web maintenance?
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.
A 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, and website performance monitoring, 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 the SEO of your website, to make sure that your website is visible in search engines; which includes tracking website ranking, backlinks, 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?
Why Website Maintenance Is Important
Web maintenance is essential because of several reasons, the most significant being that it keeps your website working smoothly. There are a 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 website maintenance in more detail:
1. SEO Outcomes
The whole point of running a business is to have customers, clients, or increasing website traffic.
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.
2. Customer Experience
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 prevent them from completing certain tasks. Maybe your site is not optimized for mobile phones or an outdated plug-in is an issue.
3. 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.
4. 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, 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 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 revenue.
5. Latest Trends In Design & Technology
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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
Let’s check regular website maintenance tasks what does website maintenance include? in the following section.
Regular Website Maintenance Tasks: Yearly, Quarterly, Monthly, And Daily
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
- 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 and get software for security.
- Get a plugin to monitor website uptime.
Website Maintenance Tasks for Yearly
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 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.
- 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 of 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
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.
- 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
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.
- Check your website's loading speed and figure out if there is anything that is slowing it down. You can refer to Google page speed insights for this purpose.
- Analysis of your site reporting through Google Analytics and monitoring the website traffic, bounce rate, tracking 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
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.
- Check that all of your pages are loading properly and there are no errors
- Check for 403 errors and if there are any, fix them using these error 403 easy ways to fix
- 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 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.
Final Word
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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FAQs
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.
- Broken external links
- 404 error
- Browser compatibility
- Technological shifts
- Crashed servers
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.
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