Undoubtedly, the benefits of regular website maintenance will lead to greater customer satisfaction, higher ranking in search and of course, stronger revenue.
Much like maintaining your home or car, maintaining a website is a task that can easily be pushed to the back of our mind. At least while everything is working well. Before we know it, the gutters are leaking, our roof is in a mess and the car won’t start right when we need it most.
Forget splashing out big for emergency tasks or revenue generating campaigns when you’re desperate for leads or revenue. Invest a little over a long period of time and reap the rewards for a lower total cost.
What’s more, keeping your website maintained helps your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Website maintenance tasks both technical and content based are part of a good SEO agency’s regular tasks. Keeping your website fast, navigable and up-to-date are the basics of SEO and you can achieve this by having a great Web Producer on your team.
The benefits of regular website maintenance you can expect are:
Better website security
Not only making sure plugins are updated, a lot of work goes into other background tasks you may not think of. Monitoring links aimed at your website. Checking search engine results pages for random, spam pages that shouldn’t be there. And regularly checking your website’s files on the server for any irregularities will help.
Improved website speed
When your website is properly maintained, it runs faster which helps a lot in the next point on the list.
Enhanced user experience
Users will enjoy a much enhanced user experience as a direct benefit of regular website maintenance. Security, speed, the ability to find what they want quickly and without errors.
Identifying and fixing website errors
Regular maintenance means you’ll always spot technical and content errors quickly and fix them before too many of your users even notice them. Probably not before Google bot finds is and reports you to
Staying up-to-date with the latest features and technology
Goes with the territory of running a top performing website. Instead of looking once every three years and being sold a total website rebuild you may not have even needed, if you keep your website’s technology up-to-date you will avoid that sudden huge financial outlay. It also helps keep your user experience and website speed up there with the best of them.
Optimised product listings and descriptions
If you’re in the e-commerce space, you’ve got this sorted, right? An important part of any website’s hygiene regimen, but especially so if you’re selling products.
Keeping content and promotions up-to-date
Similar to optimising your product listings and descriptions, every website includes content that should be kept up-to-date. Of course, if you include promotions, be sure to update them when they’re over or whenever a new promotion pops up.
Using hospitality as an example, a hotel may run an offer for Easter every year. In that case, it would be a great idea to create a landing page and keep it live throughout the year. Simply update it with the latest details and dates for the next event a few months before Easter. Great for your visitors and great for SEO.
Increased website rankings on search engines
Having up-to-date content and great (product or otherwise) descriptions on your website will help your search rankings.
Maintaining a secure website doesn’t just mean sticking an SSL Certificate on there. Help make sure sure your website doesn’t get hackedby finding and removing any attempts to hijack your website quickly so you don’t lose ground in search.
Tracking and analysing website performance is easy to do if you use Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, Screaming Frog and other great pieces of software.
Reduced downtime
Reliable, secure websites that choose a great hosting service enjoy reduced downtime. Keep your website online longer, make more money.
Improved website growth potential
If everything is running as it should, identifying new growth areas becomes even easier. You already know you’re performing well in all areas, so when it comes time to grow visibility even further, you won’t need to tackle 101 other tasks to make sure your new initiative actually has a positive effect.
You can achieve all of these benefits through small tasks that cost very little over a long period of time. Those benefits build up to deliver huge cost savings and revenue figures.