What is a Website Maintenance Plan and Why do I Need One?
Just like you get regular checkups for the health of your body, your business’s website needs regular checkups too. A website maintenance plan is a way to be proactive about keeping your website productive and in good condition. It helps you identify problems before they start affecting your website’s performance, increasing your bounce rate, and damaging your brand. Just one broken link can make a potential customer think that you don’t care about keeping your website up to date, and that can turn them off from doing business with you. A slow server can also make people click away from your site as well as make your site rank lower in search results.
This can all be avoided with a quality website maintenance plan. Let’s look at some parts of a website maintenance plan that will get the job done.
Content
Review the content of your site on the regular to make sure it’s up-to-date and engaging. A website maintenance plan places a high priority on quality content to improve functionality and search engine optimization (SEO). Here are some elements of a website maintenance plan when it comes to content:
- Taking down content that is no longer valid
- Making sure that the content is easily readable
- Checking for typos and grammatical errors
- Updating keywords and phrases
- Placing relevant content like updated product descriptions
SEO
Making the most of SEO is an important part of a website maintenance plan. SEO aims to place you high in search engine results so you get noticed more than the competition. We improve your SEO in ways like these:
- Using keywords and phrases that turn up frequently in searches
- Using current, optimized content
- Using engaging images and videos
- Placing internal and external links
Security
Making sure that your website’s security system is strong is essential for your website maintenance plan. Ideally, security checks should be done at least once a week. These checks are not only for the security of your website, but the security of all the people who visit your website. As part of your website maintenance plan, we include services like these:
- Updating your secure sockets layer (SSL) certificate
- Installing and/or updating security plugins and patches
- Monitoring for outages
- Monitoring for hacking
- Monitoring for malware
- Updating your content management system (CMS)
Backup
Your website should be backed up regularly with manual backups or by using automated backup tools. If your site or server crashes, a recent backup will have your information saved so that you can be back online as quickly as possible. Regularly backing up your website as part of your maintenance plan also guards you from issues like these:
- Cyber attacks
- Domain problems
- Accidental deletion (it happens)
- Natural disasters
Let’s Make Plans
Your website maintenance plan should be thorough, easy to navigate, and results-driven. Work with me and you’ll be working with an expert intimately familiar with website maintenance. Not only that, but I can also help you tailor your website maintenance to meet your company’s goals. Contact me to find out more at [insert desired contact information here].