5 Ways Website Maintenance Services Will Help Your Business

Can you imagine buying a brand new car and never changing the oil in it or checking the tire pressure? For most of us, this would be a travesty – your engine would deteriorate and the ride would be rough! Yet, you would be amazed at the number of people who do this very thing with their websites.

Website maintenance is a critical part of having a presence on the web today. Designing and deploying the site is just the start. Modern sites are complex collections of software that require periodic attention and tune-ups. And, just like the driver who neglects their car, the site owner who neglects their site will find it functioning poorly for them right when they need it firing on all cylinders.

As a business owner, you depend on your site to present your idea or product to the world around you. Here are 5 ways that having website maintenance services available to your company will make your business more marketable online.

1. Software Updates and Security

Websites used to be pretty simple. At their base, they were simply a collection of static files that you would upload to a server. A modern site, however, is usually a database-driven software platform. Each site is, itself, an application. And, just like any application on your computer, your website’s software needs to be updated periodically.

An update may make an improvement in how the site works, but in most cases, it is to keep your site operating securely. Improvements are made to the back end of website software all the time as vulnerabilities are discovered on a regular basis. The implications may not be obvious to you, but a company that is providing you with website maintenance services is going to understand these changes and their importance. The end result is that your website will function smoothly and securely.

2. A Built-In Disaster Recovery Plan

If you’re currently managing your own website, I want you to think for a moment – what you would do if your site was suddenly lost? Maybe the server your website is hosted on crashed; maybe your site was hacked and replaced with something completely different. How would you recover?

If your answer for this question didn’t come to you immediately, then you probably need help maintaining your website. The peace of mind of knowing that your site is being routinely backed up is priceless. These backups are the key which will allow professionals to get your site back up and running quickly – with as little downtime as possible – in the event something ever goes wrong. That is the difference between sleeping through a site disaster and begging your budget hosting provider for help (when they can’t).

3. Fresh, Updated Content

Do you understand the importance of keeping the information on your site current and up to date? Websites that are updated more frequently get crawled more frequently by search engines. They show that the business is alive and flourishing. They show that the business owners are interested in what’s going on in their markets.

If this is done improperly, however, the overall effect can be more negative than positive. Content should be properly formatted and presented in a way that is visually appealing and easy to read. Images should be applicable to the content and be integrated into the overall design. And links must work – broken links can have negative effects on your own SEO (Search Engine Optimization), as well as open you up to a whole host of issues.

Your website should validate and meet W3C standards. Validation is a way of “standardizing” the code that runs behind websites. Web crawlers pay attention to how “clean” your code is. Valid code is clean code and clean code makes web crawlers happy.

But, beyond all of this, a site that contains broken or improperly formatted links can simply be seen as unprofessional. Would you be put off by a restaurant with typos throughout its menu? Would you make assumptions about the owners and staff based on it? People do the same thing with your website.

It is your website maintenance company that will make sure that your content is properly formatted, looks good on your site, and contains links that are functional while also working to improve your site’s rankings on search engines.

4. Tracking ROI with Solid Analytics

If you want to maximize the return on your website investment, you need to understand and interpret the data that your visitors leave behind for you. A website that exists on the web yet produces no visitors or revenue is a fairly useless website.

By using solid analytics and working in conjunction with your website maintenance company, you can make sure that you understand what is bringing visitors to your site and who they are. You can gain insight into what they are doing when they are there. And, ultimately, you can learn why they are, or are not, doing what you need them to do during their visits.

Our website analytics track real visitors – not “bots” and “spiders”.

5. Focus on Your Business

Your core business is not in web development or design. Likewise, we lack your level of expertise relating to your business.

So, allow us to put an idea out there for you: You run your business and we will run your website. You do what you do best; be it business development, sales, generation of new ideas, or anything else that gets you going. We will do what we do best – run and maintain your website. You grow your business and we’ll make sure that the web side of the business is taken care of.

You shouldn’t have to worry about whether or not your site is being backed up. You shouldn’t have to consider the idea of your site disappearing from the web and you not knowing what to do about it. You shouldn’t have to worry about whether a seemingly-innocent mistake in a blog post is something that would cost you search engine ranking.

Our website maintenance services are the key to not having to worry about these things. Free your mind so you can run your business.

Contact Us Today

Your confidence in your website and the technology behind it should be strong. We can build that confidence and increase the effectiveness of your business’ website. Contact us today for more information regarding our website maintenance services.