You just completed your website’s redesign after months of design, content, and technical updates. Phew. Now you’re relieved that you can put that project aside until it needs a facelift in the future.
Or….maybe not.
Your website is a significant investment, and unlike your 9-5 employees, it never stops working for you. It’s on 24/7, like an employee that never sleeps! As such, it needs constant updating and optimizing to perform at its best, not to mention to protect it from unforeseen crashes from virus attacks, hosting errors, or countless other causes.
To some people, a website maintenance plan feels like an unnecessary marketing spend, especially after the significant time and money spent redesigning an entire site! But in our experience, a maintenance plan is absolutely vital and actually saves time and money in the long run. Here are our top three reasons why savvy marketers invest in website maintenance plans.
Save Money & Avoid Emergencies
You can avoid costly and stressful emergencies by ensuring every part of your website is updated and running smoothly. You don’t want to wait until something breaks a major part of the site, or even brings the entire website down!
Ignoring, or simply failing to notice, seemingly small issues can lead to major problems or even cause your site to crash. This then results in lost business, revenue, time, and often significant cost to repair the problems. Ongoing website maintenance makes sure any small issues are caught and repaired before they become bigger problems – things like plug-in updates, hosting issues, theme updates, and more.
Keep Your Website Secure
A website that isn’t regularly managed is an easy target for hackers looking for unsecure sites. This doesn’t mean developers built your site in a vulnerable manner – it’s just the nature of websites to need constant updating. WordPress sites are targeted by hackers at the highest rate due to their popularity, usually when plug-ins or themes become outdated or aren’t well-managed.
A maintenance plan means your website benefits from regular software and plug-in updates. It also ensures your site is properly backed up locally and on off-site servers, just in case the worst happens and you need to access a prior version of your website.
Gather Data and Make Frequent Updates
If you invest time and money into your website, you’ll want to regularly know how it’s performing. But gathering and evaluating this type of data takes time that might not be scheduled into your regular work rhythms. A website maintenance plan gives you support to look at all of this data, interpret it, and guide future changes. This level of insight lets you make impactful changes on a regular basis that will lead to more engagement and more conversions.
Consistent monitoring of your site and its data will reveal any user experience (UX) issues and help you improve the UX based on real-time user data. Maybe the data reflects issues with your site navigation, or shows that a certain section of the website isn’t rendering well on mobile. A maintenance plan finds these issues and lets you fix them before they result in a significant loss of revenue and engagement.
A website maintenance plan also lets you make consistent search engine optimization (SEO) updates. SEO is not a once and done project. It requires constant adjustments to make sure you’re using the best key words and getting your content or product in front of the right people.
Ongoing data collection and analysis can also allow you to improve accessibility, try new calls-to-action, update images, and optimize lead magnets. It will also let you make updates to your privacy policy so you can be transparent about how you gather web visitor data – this is necessary to comply with GDPR and other global standards that are updated often.
Let’s Protect and Optimize Your Website, Together
Hopefully it’s clear that a website maintenance plan is not only critical to protect one of your company’s most valuable and important assets, but also key for making sure it gives you the biggest return on your investment. Your website is not a static tool, but one that needs frequent attention and should be constantly evolving. From ensuring pages are rendering well across all devices, to making sure the site is regularly backed up, to reviewing security scans, a website maintenance plan will help you get the most out of your investment.
We want to save you time and money in the long term so you aren’t bogged down by unnecessary, stressful website emergencies and can focus your time and money where it’s most needed. The Source Marketing Group provides high quality and affordable website maintenance that keeps your website secure and optimized, so you don’t have to stress. Email us today to see how we can help you get the most out of your website.
Author Profile:
Kristin is the CEO/Founder of The Source Marketing Group. The marketing agency is focused on elevating female-, veteran-, and minority-owned businesses.