5 Reasons To Keep Up Website Maintenance

Website maintenance — ah! The bane of owning a website — the dreaded maintenance of the site.

When you first set up your website, you might have thought it was a set it and forget it kind of thing. Once it was built, you didn’t have to worry about it again.

It would just sit there and hum along as you go about your life.

While that sounds great, there are some basic things you need to do to maintain your website. Continue reading this article and learn why you should keep your website maintained properly.

Your Motivation for Website Maintenance

While things like link building services and social media campaigns to get more people to your website might be more exciting to you, if you don’t maintain your website it’s all for nothing.

1. Improves SEO

SEO stands for search engine optimization and is the act of optimizing your website to appear prominently on Google search and other search engines.

When your website appears at the top of search engines, you’re able to get traffic to your website from highly interested people. These people are searching for a solution that you can provide them right now.

Search engines like to know they are providing the best content for their searchers which is why they make sure to rank websites that are up to date. If your site hasn’t updated in years, you’re likely to start sliding in the search rankings.

2. Keeps Your Website Secure

There are constant improvements in security. Most of these improvements are to counter some new hacking attack. If there are holes in your system that means that someone with ill intent could get into your information and the information of your customers.

Common CMS (content management system) products like WordPress have regular updates but if you haven’t logged into your dashboard for a long time, you could be behind on 5, 10, 15 or even more updates.

3. Gives Your Visitors a Better Experience

When you fix your website and keep it in good working order, you give your visitors a better experience. A better experience means they are likely to stay on your site longer.

If visitors stay on your site longer, they will have more time to get to know you and potentially purchase some of your products and services.

User experience is one of the major focuses of top companies these days due to the fact that it allows you to have a competitive edge. Many people are willing to pay more for a product or service if they get experience with it.

4. Makes Your Site Faster

When you properly maintain your website and have everything up to date, your website will run faster.

Site speed is now a ranking factor in Google and is likely a ranking factor in other websites as well. No one wants to wait for a website to load. They are ready for the information they searched for before they hit the go button and if you make them wait more than a couple of seconds, they are going to find someone else to service their query.

5. Brand Image

Even if you have everything else right, when you fail to take care of your website, it says a lot about your brand.

No matter how great your colors are or your brand messaging, when they go to your website and your site looks like it came from 2003 — turn off!

Your brand image is an important part of your business and your website is a large part of your brand image.

Top Site Maintenance Tasks

Now that you understand how important site maintenance is, you’re likely wondering what you should do beyond putting through the automatic updates on your CMS.

1. Design Overhaul

If it’s been a while since your site was created, it is time to do a design overhaul. Your site likely has too much going on and isn’t offering the user experience most searchers now demand.

Make sure you have plenty of white space and very small paragraphs that make content easy to digest as people are reading through your website.

2. Rewrite Your Content

You’ve likely learned a thing or two about copywriting since the last time you wrote on your website. Go back through your content and see if there are any areas where you can improve.

You can also add more information as needed. If you’ve learned something new, make sure to add it in. You can also write at the start of the post that it was updated on that given day.

3. Update Outdated Information

If you have old phone numbers, email address or physical address, make sure that you take them off the site and update it with your new information. Outdated information screams website neglect and doesn’t develop trust in your readers.

4. Test Your Site

If you update your website, you need to test it to make sure nothing broke. You should also do annual updates even if you don’t do any massive updates.

You don’t want to be two years into your site just to find out that an important sales link or a contact form wasn’t working all of that time.