Do you love your website? Is it more stylish, faster and cleverer than any than you’ve had before? There is no doubt that new website technologies have made websites better, but this also comes at a cost and complexity. It’s these added complexities that are at the heart of why website maintenance is vital.
Factors at play in website maintenance
Proper maintenance will help in three key areas. Security, speed and visitor experience. I’ll look at these individually later on, but these factors are hugely important in keeping your website valuable to your business.
Regardless of the platform, or underlying system, that your website uses, maintenance is key to keeping things running smoothly.
To give websites all the bells and whistles that visitors now expect means that these platforms are getting more and more complex. This means more computer code which in turn means more potential issues. The companies that make these platforms work very hard to ensure all holes are plugged as soon as possible. They do this by releasing updates. The first sign of a lack of maintenance is that these updates are not applied to your website system. However, good maintenance is more than just updates.
Security, Security, Security
While updates are a part of the story, security relies on proactive management of the whole site. Security researcher Daniel Cid, of security firm Sucuri, says that over 15,000 WordPress sites were hacked in 2016 alone. All website platforms suffered from unrelenting security violation attempts, WordPress just happens to be the most popular.
The background settings for website platforms are a complex business. Knowing what should be turned on and off is a big element to website maintenance. Likewise knowing the warning signs, like bogus user sign-ins and attempts to access hidden parts of the site, mean proactive maintenance can stop issues before they affect you. It’s also very important that the website backup system is checked and tested. Being able to replace parts of the site if required can save a huge amount of time.
The need for speed
Poor website loading times will affect everything from the number of users who leave your site early to their shopping behaviour while on your site.
Website marketers Kissmetrics produced a neat infographic on the subject. If your website homepage takes 4 seconds to load, you’ll be losing 25% of your visitors before they even see your site.
The function of all that functionality
Updates to your site will, often, bring new features. By making careful study of what’s included in each and every update as part of my proactive maintenance package. I can advise my customers of how they can leverage this to their advantage.
Conversely, we may also need to turn off some of these new elements to either improve speed, security, or both.
As you can see, maintenance is a really important task and one which companies should take seriously. Hacked or slow sites take much of the value away from your website and may dent the confidence that customers have in your business. Maintain now, or pay for it later.
Please feel free to get in contact if you require help with your website.