We all know how important it is to have a functional website that’s easy to use and perfectly represents your brand. But the work doesn’t end the moment your new website is live.
Website maintenance is a crucial part of any website development and needs to be included in your budget. Websites that aren’t maintained from the get-go will ultimately run slower, be at risk of being hacked and can provide a poor user experience.
For many companies, a website is key to brand awareness, attracting customers and generating revenue. In a digital space that’s rapidly changing, it’s a good idea to hire a digital agency that specialises in WordPress maintenance plans.
This allows you to focus more on your actual business and spend less time watching tutorials on how to update crucial plugins.
What Is Website Maintenance?
Website maintenance is the process of regularly checking your website for any errors so that it works at full capacity and is secure.
You can think of it a bit like a car. Cars need to be taken to the mechanic regularly to ensure they’re working correctly and are safe to drive.
Of course, you can have your car seen to when something begins to rattle. But it’s much better to take it for regular check-ups to prevent any major disasters from happening.
It’s exactly the same for your website. As with a car, maintaining your website’s health also works out cheaper in the long run.
Benefits of Regular Website Maintenance
By working with a Melbourne digital agency that provides monthly website maintenance packages, you’ll be able to ensure:
- All website pages load without errors
- You have regular and comprehensive backups
- Crucial plugins are updated and checked for relevancy
- Your website remains functional and performs well across devices
- Website data remains secure
An agency will also be able to analyse statistics to see which pages are doing best, which blogs are the most popular, where traffic is coming from and anything that could be improved.
With your website properly maintained and running smoothly, your business will benefit from a better user experience for your visitors and an appealing website to search engines.
This can result in more leads, engaging customers, and ultimately more revenue for your company.
Why Is Website Maintenance Important?
Website maintenance is an essential part of any healthy website. Similar to any other business technology like your Microsoft Office cloud services, or specialised systems such as transport software or payroll software – your website needs regular updates and maintenance. Here are the top 5 reasons why you should regularly maintain your site.
1./ Increase The Security Of Your Website
Unmaintained security gaps can allow hackers to enter your website. An efficient website maintenance team will be able to spot any bugs, update outdated software and fix security patches.
This is even more important if your website uses a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress. Your agency will be able to remove old applications (which aren’t secure) and ensure that no sensitive files can be found on your website.
WordPress maintenance plans are essential if you want a healthy website that’s secure and not prone to ongoing bugs.
2./ Perform Regular Backups For Quick Data Restore
You never know when you might need a backup of your website. If the system crashes, you get hacked, or there’s another reason why your site shuts down one day, you will certainly wish you had one.
A working backup allows you to restore your website, so you don’t have to pay for it to be built from scratch again.
A good digital agency will back up the source code after every update. They’ll also back up your website content so you don’t lose any text, images, videos or other important content.
3./ Regular Hosting Updates
Business owners often underestimate the importance of maintaining your website hosting. Hosting is a critical element of the functionality of your website.
Your WordPress CMS and website plugins are constantly updating. Regular website maintenance ensures that you are keeping up-to-date with these critical updates and that the PHP is updated to support these. And this is managed at the hosting level.
What does this mean in English? Let’s compare this to our mobile phones. We’ve all experienced regular updates of apps on our mobiles. Just say you keep updating the apps, but you don’t update any software for your phone (i.e. the operating system). After a while, your apps and phone don’t talk to each other like they should and are no longer functional.
The same happens with your website. It’s important that your hosting is updated to support not just your website but supporting plugin updates.
4./ Support Your SEO Efforts
It’s not just content updates on your website that can help with Search Engine Optimisation. Regular website maintenance helps to support crucial search engine rankings.
Website functionality and page speed across all devices is important and take some effort to maintain. This also ensures your website is mobile responsive, which provides a good user experience for your customers.
Websites that are slow or don’t fully work on a mobile device are frustrating and will likely lead to a huge bounce rate. And the bottom line is that Google doesn’t like that. So, by factoring in website maintenance, you’ll also be helping your SEO plan and strengthening your website.
5./ Improve Your User Experience
Google may not like slow websites, but customers like them even less. Pages that take forever to load, links that lead to 404 errors or a website that hasn’t renewed its SSL certificate don’t exactly instil confidence in a visitor.
Your website will be the first thing many people see of your business. There’s no point claiming you pay attention to detail or that you always turn up on time if you have outdated links or irrelevant content on your website.
Can You Perform Website Maintenance Yourself?
Of course, you (or your staff) can maintain the website yourself – much like you can fix the rattling in your car too. But why not leave it up to professionals who know what they’re doing?
By partnering with an agency that provides WordPress maintenance plans, you’ll free up your time to concentrate on your business. No more online tutorials, messing around in your CMS or missing important security alerts.
You can confidently put all your efforts into providing your services, knowing someone else is looking after your website.
Hiring a Melbourne digital agency will also cost you less money in the long run. If you sign up for a monthly website maintenance package, you’ll be able to address any issues you have before they become a major problem.
Example Of Not Having Your Website Professionally Maintained
Say you’re not regularly checking, and as a result, your website is hacked one day. Firstly, your client data may be compromised, which could prove costly for your company (both financially and in reputation).
But there may also be some instances your website could be completely shut down. This means you’ll have to pay for it to be redesigned or rebuilt. This would be much more expensive than regular monthly website maintenance packages.
You also have to consider the potential revenue you’ll lose if your website is down. Customers won’t be able to find you, let alone order your services which could mean you lose their trust.
Why Should You Choose Elevate Websites For Your Website Maintenance?
At Elevate Websites, we care about your business and the health of your website. Whether you’re a small local business or a large corporate one, you need website maintenance to make your company’s online presence successful and relevant.
We take the time to understand your business, its goals, and your budget. We then develop a website maintenance plan that best suits your situation.
We provide the full package. We offer website hosting to ensure your site is secure and loading quickly as well as backups in case anything goes wrong. We also regularly update your website with company changes and content which keeps it relevant to visitors and attractive to search engines.
Our website maintenance team will ensure your website is running smoothly and that your WordPress theme and plugins are up to date. This helps with security as well as page speed and user experience.
We also check for any software clashes that occur from incompatibility, which could be affecting how your website runs.
How Much Does Website Maintenance Cost?
We offer a range of different website maintenance packages and services to suit different businesses. Of course, the website maintenance cost varies depending on which service would work best for your unique website.
All our WordPress maintenance plans are invoiced monthly, so you can easily incorporate the cost into your budget and plan in advance. If any extra work needs to be done to maintain your website, these additional costs are discussed and agreed to before starting it.
We understand that for many businesses, website maintenance can sometimes feel like an unnecessary cost. But trust us when we say it isn’t. It’s a crucial part of keeping your website running smoothly, attracting new customers and preventing it from being hacked.
Are You Ready To Partner With A Professional To Run Your Website Maintenance?
Website maintenance is crucial for any company. But it’s also essential it’s done correctly. If you’re not sure how to do it or you don’t have the time, you should consider working with a Melbourne digital agency that can manage it for you.
At Elevate Websites, we offer a full range of website maintenance services so that you can ensure your site remains up-to-date, safe and functional to users. Contact our website maintenance team to see the difference we can make to your company website’s performance and ongoing success.
Calem Koek is a web designer and owner of leading Melbourne-based digital marketing agency Elevate Websites. He has been helping businesses in Melbourne and across Australia scale their business online through quality website design and world class SEO services.