To understand why website maintenance is so important, consider the regular maintenance needed in your home.

It’s a continuous process of cleaning, updating, and servicing. For example, you might have your gutters cleaned before the rainy season hits.

When your sink isn’t draining correctly, you call a plumber. If your heat or A/C would happen to go out, your first instinct would likely be to call an HVAC technician.

Regular maintenance is an essential part of homeownership.

The same applies to owning a business and operating a website. Optimising your web presence is crucial to keeping your business running well. Your original design may need updating. Bug fixes and potential crashes need attention.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) details to boost traffic and increase returns will need to be adjusted based on the services, specials, etc., that you offer. While running the business itself is important, how people reach your website and what they see is what will drive revenue.

Your business website is the first impression that many customers will get. Your website is your image. If your image is poorly maintained, how do you expect to generate traffic, increase revenue, and retain a solid customer base?

Knowing the importance of your business image and regular website maintenance will help keep you in line with the competition within your industry. In this article, we will look at what website maintenance is, what it does for your business and the ways you can keep your business website up to date.

What is Website Maintenance?

Website maintenance refers to any and all of the tasks that are crucial to keeping your website functioning properly and ensuring that it is up to date. It is an ongoing process that checks your site for issues, makes updates to plugins and content, and much more. It can seem like a full-time job keeping your site up to date, and it often is! That’s why website maintenance and design firms spend years honing their craft with best practices and ongoing education to stay on top of the ever-changing web.

Top 3 Benefits of Website Maintenance

1. Maintaining Your Security

One of the primary concerns for any website owner/operator, especially with online traffic growth, is how to keep the website secure. How do you protect your landing page from hackers? Is there a security plan in place to recover lost data if a security breach does occur? When your website lacks stability in the cybersecurity side of things, your visitors won’t feel comfortable clicking ahead to see what your business offers.

If you work through a third-party operator, such as Drupal, system releases frequently occur to fix bugs, patch software and update internal security.

Why is maintaining security important?

If you don’t keep up with routine website maintenance and updates, you will be running on outdated security and opening the door for hackers to get in. Not only is this a risk for your business’ data and finances, but for that of your clients, customers, or employees as well.

2. Maintaining Your Site Traffic

To increase revenue, you need to bring in more customers and solidify your existing customer base. To do that, you need to engage customers with a strong web presence, i.e., your website. Boosting site traffic will give business returns that you likely wouldn’t see otherwise.

Why is maintaining site traffic important?

When you update your website regularly, the website may rank higher when mass search engines such as Google. When your site ranks higher, it will be more visible to people searching your industry for products and services. This is also where using SEO keywords comes into play.

When potential customers search an industry keyword, content appears that most closely matches that keyword (and according to search rankings). The more you update your website to exclude excess/duplicate information, include more precise keywords, and present other valuable information, the more likely people will be to click ahead and see what your business is all about.

3. Maintaining Your Visitor Experience

When you consider the design and function of your business website, step into the visitor’s shoes. If you’re looking for a particular product or service and click on an industry website, you want to be able to find what you need in the least amount of time possible. You expect something easy to use and easy to find.

This is where UI/UX comes into play. While many modern platforms do the job for you as far as web design and function, ensuring that your choices within these platforms keep the user at the forefront is crucial in how people will interact with your business.

Why is maintaining the visitor experience important?

Engaging your audience with regular updates, including blog posts, images, business updates, events, and more, will enhance the visitor experience and help promote your brand in a way that others in your industry may not be doing yet.

Make sure you don’t have excessive or duplicate information on your website that would appear as clutter. In the same way, remove any outdated information (so that you don’t lose credibility/professionalism in your client interactions). Providing existing and potential customers with the best experience possible when visiting your website will increase site traffic and, in turn, revenue.

Need Website Maintenance Help?

At Minx Digital, our team is ready to help your business reach new heights with the best WordPress web development and website maintenance and care around.

Offering both full services and ways for you to learn how to do some web maintenance on your own, we have a wealth of experience in digital marketing.

With over 30 years of web design and development experience, helping your business keep up with new designs, industry trends, and website maintenance will be a breeze.