Website Maintenance. Sounds terribly important, doesn’t it? The phrase brings to mind a tiny team of nanobots crawling around the internet, brandishing wee wrenches. But maintain, you must. You can’t create a website and then just leave it there, hoping that positive thoughts and good vibes will sustain it.
After launching a brand new website, with everything so shiny and perfect, it’s tempting to think that it will always be that way.
People get busy with new customers and a fuller schedule, and let a few tasks slide. Website care can easily become one of those tasks, since problems don’t present themselves right away.
But a website is like a garden. Not kinda like a garden… exactly like one. Website launch is the first day of Spring. The sun shines, the lawn is perfectly manicured, every flower is in bloom and there are no bugs in sight.
If you trim the hedges and mow the lawn at this point, sweep up a spider or two, you’ll keep everything in tip-top shape. But turn your back on it for a few months, neglect the upkeep, and you’ll end up with a bug-infested eyesore.
If you want your website to help your business grow, you’ve got to tend to it.
Website care takes less time and costs less money than website repair.
Keep up with the work, and enjoy these benefits:
- keep visitors (and search engines) happy with fresh content
- encourage people to engage with you by commenting on your posts
- attract new visitors with pages that rank highly with search engines
- not losing a potential lead because your sign-up form is broken
- avoid embarassing system downtimes and Page Not Found errors
Keep up with the work, and enjoy these benefits:
- keep visitors (and search engines) happy with fresh content
- encourage people to engage with you by commenting on your posts
- attract new visitors with pages that rank highly with search engines
- not losing a potential lead because your sign-up form is broken
- avoid embarassing system downtimes and Page Not Found errors
To keep your website running smoothly, perform these tasks every month:
- Update website software and plugins
- Check that all of your sign-up forms are running properly
- Remove any spam comments from blog posts
- Check all pages for broken links and load errors
- Write one or more blog posts to keep your community engaged and encourage organic SEO traffic
- Check website load speed and review security scans
- Analyze website statistics from the previous month, so you can know which marketing efforts are working
- Test your website on all devices and browsers to ensure it displays correctly
- Run a backup and make sure a previous version of your site is stored off-site
If this sounds like a tall order, that’s because it is. There is a degree of experience required to do the job well. I’ve listed tasks above that are a great starting point, but every website is unique. Updating a plugin just because your dashboard suggests it is a gamble if you don’t know the domino effect that an update could have on other parts of your system.
Once your website launches, you have a decision to make. Invest the time and energy taking care of your site – become your own webmaster – or outsource the job.
The Choice is Yours
At Savvy Digital Design, I provide excellent customer service and can keep your WordPress website up-to-date, secure and working all year round. I have several Care Plans available depending on the degree of maintenance your site needs.
If you would like to know which option is right for you, you can look at my Care Plan package options.