If you have a brick and mortar business, you know all about the amount of work it takes to maintain your place. You know that the floors need to be cleaned, your windows washed, light bulb replaced, leaks patched, desks and chairs fixed or replaced, etc … the list goes on and on. Although your virtual presence does not necessarily have physical parts, it too needs just as much attention and maintenance as your brick and mortar counterpart.
Here are 5 reasons for creating a maintenance program for your business website:
1. Fresh Content
For your online business presence, make sure you’re giving your readers a reason to come back. No one wants to read the same content week after week or be looking at outdated information about an event that happened 3 months ago. If you’re not updating, your essentially telling your potential customers that you are not paying attention to your business or you may even be giving them an impression that you may be going out of business.
2. Website Speed
What if your business website does not load or takes a really long time to appear? Your business website is usually the first point of customer interaction, so you need to leave the visitors with a positive lasting impression. How many customers are you potentially loosing as a result of your snail-crawl load time?There may be a whole host of reasons why your pages may not be loading fast. Slow server, improperly optimized pages or images, broken links, etc. Slow pages can happen at any time and the only way you’d know there is an issue is if you’ve got a regularly planned maintenance on your site.
3. Website Backup
Anyone who has ever had their work or sensitive data crash on them should appreciate this. Technology sometimes fails us, so having your website and all of the files, photos, updates, posts, pages, etc, backed-up on regular basis can prove to be ‘business-saving’.
You have to remember that your website resides on a server. Hopefully you are with a reputable company that has many fail-proof systems and backup options. However, even if you are with the best hosting service out there, sometimes their systems can fail. When your data is gone you have no recourse, unless of course you have done the responsible thing and have been backing everything up on regular basis yourself. Backing up your website is just smart and easy way to protect yourself and your business. It doesn’t take too much time, it doesn’t cost much and it’s easy to do.
4. System and Plug-in Updates
Have you ever known technology to stand still? Did you ever buy a piece of hardware only to find out that a week later a new better device is available? So why would you assume that your website code or the platform (such as WordPress) would be always the same. The reason for the constant updates is to not only keep up with the latest hardware requirements, but also to keep up with the new coding requirements. Also the plugin you downloaded last week may have had a bug and if you don’t install the new update, it may mess with your entire site. In some cases your entire site may cease to work properly unless you update the platform.
In addition, search giants, such as Google, may not allow your site to be listed unless it conforms to the latest programming requirements.When was the last time you’ve run a system check or an update? You may be doing yourself and your business an injustice if you’re not checking it on regular basis.
5. Measure and Improve
Measuring and improving the success of your business website is very often overlooked by business owners. But how else do you know if your efforts are having an impact?
Search engines give your websites and your web pages scores (marks), which determine your search position. And as we all know from our years at school, good ranking is rewarded to those who not only work at it consistently but also to those who do the right things. And to make things a little more complicated, search engines like Google, are constantly changing their requirements of what it takes to be at the top. Believe me, the websites that show up at the top of the organic searches didn’t get there by accident. It takes work and dedication.
Feel Confident in your Website Maintenance
Some business owners may be getting a bit overwhelmed with all of the things you need to do, on top of running your business. You can outsource the website maintenance part of your responsibilities and you’ll be happy you did. Imagine not worrying about your data or your articles, or whether your customers can reach you, and imagine always having someone to reach out to in case of an issue.Bottom line is that website maintenance is very often overlooked, but it’s a simple and inexpensive insurance policy for your online business.
With a quick phone call or email, minor changes can be carried out usually on the same day. You can easily contact F22 Designs directly from the bottom of your website. No searching for our phone number or address. We are always handy!
