A website maintenance plan is an ongoing service to maintain and support the overall health of your website.
By keeping the site up to date and relevant, the service also helps maintain the value of your website and organization.
A good web maintenance plan includes:
- Reviewing and Performing WordPress, Plugin and Theme Updates
- Performance Optimization and Quality Control
- Continuous improvements to fix bugs and compatibility issues
- Content Updates
- Website updates and SEO
- ADA scanning and report on the site specifically for new content
- Digital marketing assistance
- Email & Phone Support Mon-Fri 8am – 4pm
- After hours – Email & Phone Support Every day 7am – 8pm
- Analytics, reporting, and analysis
Your website is the backbone of your online presence. It helps increase your credibility, promote your business, engage with your audience and boost your conversion rates.
Why Website Maintenance Is Important
Your website is a significant investment. Unlike your employees, it works for you around the clock. However, a website is never truly complete.
Here is why your online site needs some care and quality assurance.
-SEO
Search engine optimization plays an integral part in getting your content in front of the right people. However, SEO is a continuous process that requires sustained efforts. Part of this involves making sure your website meets the mark with search engines.
Good site maintenance can boost your SEO efforts. Regular maintenance and updates will ensure your site is compatible with the latest algorithms and tools. This will help to improve your search engine rankings, making it easier for your business to be found online.
-Security
You are mitigating risk to your organization and you personally. Hackers attack more than 30,000 websites daily. Businesses can no longer take online security lightly. To protect your business from cyber threats and keep sensitive data secure, constantly monitor your website and invest in the latest security updates.
When your website is not well-maintained, it will be vulnerable to a host of online attacks. A comprehensive website maintenance plan will go a long way in helping to keep your website secure.
This will, in turn, protect your business, customers, and reputation.
A Quick Checklist for Website Maintenance
The most time-sensitive maintenance requirements are website security updates and patches.
Below is a list of website maintenance tasks that should be completed regularly:
To be done weekly
- Check that all of your pages are loading without errors
- Run a backup and make sure a previous version of your site is stored
- Make updates to website software and plugins
- Check that all of your forms are running properly
- Remove any spam comments from pages and posts
- Check your pages to see if there are any broken links
- Search for 404 errors and fix or redirect
- Write one or more blog posts to keep your community engaged and encourage SEO traffic.
To be done monthly
- Check the load speed of your website and ensure that nothing is bogging it down
- Review your security scans and make sure nothing is out of place
- Analyze website statistics from the previous month
- Check your blog to see if there are any articles that could be updated
To be done quarterly
- Review your website design and structure – can it be improved?
- Check graphics and images – Do images have alt tags?
- Review SEO and meta titles and descriptions to ensure they are as effective as possible
- Test and tweak popups, forms, and calls to action
- Review your workload for efficiencies to see if anything can be automated
- Test your website on all devices and browsers to see if it displays correctly
- Review advertising and marketing campaigns to see if anything needs to be changed or updated.
- Restore a previous version of the website to check your backup health
To be done yearly
- Update any reference to the current year
- Review each page for content accuracy, grammar, typos, and relevancy
- Check any active email addresses and see if any are excessive and can be deleted
- Ensure that your website domain name and SSL is renewed
- Consider whether a website design update is due
- Review all of your top performing blog articles and see if they can be updated with new content
Website Maintenance Equals Website Success
Maintenance will keep your website running at peak performance, minimize or remove any security vulnerabilities, and ensure that your visitors find all the information they need. We live and work in a digital world, and due to the pandemic, vast amounts of people are conducting their business and finding necessities online. With more people working and staying at home, your website becomes the “face” of your brand or company. A well maintained website is also more easily augmented, allowing you to take advantage of market expansion while keeping marketing costs to a minimum. Think of website maintenance as a preventative health plan for your business, to keep you on top of your game!
When Should you Outsource Web Maintenance?
You value the health of your website and the benefits that a well maintained website brings, but when the task of updates and checking for errors becomes all that you are doing, you aren’t able to give your focus and time to actually running your business. At this point it is beneficial to hire an expert who can dedicate time to the continuity and improvements you require. A few reasons why this is beneficial and cost effective:
- A professional familiar with website maintenance will know what potential issues to look for when assessing your website for problems, and have a multitude of strategies to repair and update your site.
- Having someone adept in maintaining websites to address the more mundane tasks of keeping your website functional allows you to redirect your time and energy towards your business and towards innovation. Finding a good source to rely on for web maintenance is an investment in your company and places value on your time.
Interested in securing the success of your website and your business,
or want to know more about how we can help you with website maintenance? Contact us!
