I can think of one thing worse than not having anyone take care of your website. And that’s having an agency providing services that you don’t even understand.
Are you wasting good money on bad website management?
Web care is something that often gets overlooked. Most people don’t know how to maintain a website, and problems don’t always present themselves right away. But eventually, a neglected site ends up with outdated software, poor performance, and security issues. And you can be pretty sure that it’ll cost you potential business.
Your business requires you to do lots of things… and you likely do not have time to DIY your own website management.
If you have no idea what your web manager is doing – or even what they should be doing – here’s a quick summary.
Make It Snappy
The more pages and posts you add, new plugins you install, and photos you upload can cause a site to load slowly. There are ways to optimize your site so that each page loads quickly. And optimization is not a one-time process – even if your site used to be quick like a jackrabbit, it will still slow down over time.
Slow page load times will cause Google to not show your site in search results. And the people who do manage to find you won’t wait around for pages that take too long to display. They will lose interest, hit the Back button, and you will lose their business.
Keep Software Up-to-date
Just like the apps on your phone, new versions of the software installed on your site come out all the time. When these new version are released, you need to apply them to your site. But you don’t want to just smash the “update all” button on your dashboard.
Have you ever updated your phone and had more problems than before? The same thing can happen to your website if it’s not updated correctly. A good webmaster is aware of conflicts in plugin versions, and knows how the different parts of a site affect each other.
You could always set your website to update automatically. But sooner or later you will find broken links, missing images and other nasty surprises. Like a contact form that has stopped working. Oof.
Keep Up with Changing Business Needs
A good website manager will partner with you and keep your business goals in mind. They will recognize where your website could be updated to keep visitors on the site longer, or to convert more of those visitors into customers. And they’ll suggest things like:
add captions to photos
simplify the navigation
incorporate new calls-to-action
integrate new features
make the text easier to read
A webmaster with a good partnership mentality will pick up on things that can help your business grow in a new way. They might point out how many people are giving their emails to download your free guide. Or they show you that one of your blog posts is by far the most popular. And now you know to start a monthly newsletter, and write more posts like the popular one.
Here’s another consideration: broken forms and old data make you look like you don’t have it together. That can kill the trust factor you are trying build. Think about an event calendar that is woefully out of date. Or a section on your emplyees where half of them aren’t listed. Not good.
Security
You might think that your business isn’t big enough for your website to be hacked. But the truth is, attacks happen to sites of all sizes. Generally, smaller sites tend to be a higher risk to attacks because they aren’t being closely monitored.
A data breach can cost your business big time. So it’s important that you keeps your content and your visitor information well protected.
Outdated software can give an easy access point to hackers and malware. And the presence of malware can affect your ability to show up in search results. Google scans your website periodically to make sure it still meets the criteria to show up in search results. When a scan shows that there is malware on the site, Google is considers the site unsafe and won’t let you run ads anymore.
Backups, Restores, and Uptime Monitoring
Any number of things can cause your website to go down. Attentive website managers hook your site into a monitoring system that will email us if your site goes offline. And we are able to take quick action and restore your site so that you don’t lose out on potential customers.
Ready for an upgrade?
If you aren’t sure what your current web manager is doing for you, then it is time to find a new one. I have several web care plans, and I’m betting one of them is just right for you.