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Website maintenance is when you regularly login to your website and perform software updates for all plugins, theme files and WordPress versions. When updating your site, you are also checking for any issues, mistakes, code displaying where it shouldn’t be, elements missing from a page.
Regular updates should be done to keep your website healthy, encourage traffic to grow and help improve your SEO and Google Rankings.
Keeping your website maintained is important for all sites, big or small. It’s very much like maintain your car, you have regular services on your car. If you don’t service your car and something goes wrong, it’s often more expensive to fix.
A lot of people often think a website doesn’t require updates, so they just get it created and then never login again. Technology moves so quickly and we need to keep websites up to date to avoid any conflicts with new technology, new devices and browsers as well as keep the hackers away
Website maintenance is important to any business, big or small, in order to make a perfect first impression, engage and retain customers.
Many companies create beautiful websites to attract their target audience but then fail to monitor and update them regularly which make the site outdated and unresponsive. They fail to realize that there’s a lot of updates on the search engines and on the user behavior which they need to be kept abreast, or they will lose credibility and sales.
Therefore, regular checking of your website is something that should not be overlooked for keeping your business running efficiently.
Reason No. 1: Keeps Your Website Secure
There are constant improvements in security. Most of these improvements are to counter some new hacking attack. If there are holes in your system that means that someone with ill intent could get into your information and the information of your customers.
Additional Security Measures Include:
- Secure Hosting Provider – check your website hosting provider has a high priority for security
- PHP Version – Too many hosts still run on PHP 5, which has long lost support. At this point in time, servers should at least use PHP 7.0+. The same goes for other software like cPanel, MySQL or other database programs, and the operating system.
- Malware monitoring and removal – Not all web hosts have a policy for removing malware from an infected site, and among those that do, some will charge extra for this service. Check what they provide. you can also sign up to a Sucuri account to add extra protection.
- Firewalls and other security measures – Check if your hosting provides this, or you can get Sucuri to add a firewall to your site.
- SSL Certificate – ensure your site has an active SSL certificate and installed correctly.
- Backups – check they preform daily backups of the site. You should also keep your own off site backups incase the server goes down and they loose any backups.
Other considerations to keep your site secure:
- Consider adding a Website Application Firewall like Sucuri if you don’t have one. This will add another layer of protection to your site. This will help instantly block hackers, add DDoS mitigations and preventions.
- Use Wordfence to automatically lock out attempted logins fir invalid usernames.
- Rename you’re your default wp-admin page to a unique url you will remember.
- Enable 2 factor authentication.
Reason No. 2: Improves Google SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization and is the act of optimizing your website to appear prominently on Google search and other search engines.
When your website appears at the top of search engines, you’re able to get traffic to your website from highly interested people. These people are searching for a solution that you can provide them right now.
Search engines like to know they are providing the best content for their searchers which is why they Google wants to rank websites that are most relevant with up to date information. If Google detects your site has many broken links, malware, hasn’t been updated in a long time, it can affect your google rankings.
Reason No. 3: Gives Your Visitors a Better Experience
Responsive, faster websites, user-friendly web navigation and customized content are essential for enhanced customer experience.
When customers had a negative experience with your website because they encounter outdated information, links or contact form, your company will lose its credibility and will eventually lose sales. Therefore, performing a regular updating of your website’s theme, template files and all its features is essential to make sure your site displays properly on new versions of web browsers and mobile devices.
It is also critical to make your website responsive in order to improve the way it looks on all devices with both large and small screens. That will increase site usability and make it longer for visitors to spend time your site which help you improve your rankings in search engines.
Reason No. 4: Makes Your Site Faster
When you properly maintain your website and have everything up to date, your website will run faster.
Site speed is now a ranking factor in Google and is likely a ranking factor in other websites as well. No one wants to wait for a website to load. They are ready for the information they searched for before they hit the go button and if you make them wait more than a couple of seconds, they are going to find someone else to service their query.
Reason No. 5: Peace of Mind
Knowing your website is up to date, running smoothly on the latest version without any conflicts can take a lot of the stress away. If you are running daily backups, you have the peace of mind that if something goes wrong, you can revert back to the last backup without having to rebuild it from scratch.
Don’t skimp on Website Maintenance
Just like a car or home maintenance, website maintenance is crucial. It’s important and can save you time, money and unnecessary trouble in the long run.
Schedule maintenance time in your calendar and stick to them. Your website will thank you!
Let us help you
Website maintenance can be daunting, however it’s doable. If you need help, AmazingStudio offers affordable website maintenance packages, cancel at any time.