Wondering if website maintenance is necessary for your business?

Picture walking into a store. The overall vibe of the store does not impress you. None of the employees can answer your questions. You can’t find the product you were looking for. And even when you do find it, the cash register doesn’t work. Naturally, you would be less enthusiastic about shopping there a second time.

The same can be said for an online business. If a customer visits your website, only to find a slow and unresponsive page with a tedious and outdated design, they would not hesitate to click the back button on their browser. This is where website maintenance comes into play.

In this article, we will dive deep into the different aspects of maintaining a website for an online business, why it is important, how much it costs, and should you do it yourself or not.

Why should you take website maintenance services seriously?

Here are 5 key reasons why you should take website maintenance seriously:

1- First impressions

As Winston Churchill once said: “first impressions are important”. What? He never said that? Huh! Okay but seriously first impressions ARE important.

You are just one bad user interface away from losing a customer to a competitor. A well-maintained functioning, professional-looking website, would go a long way towards attracting more customers.

2- Competition

Nearly 90% of customers do their own research. So it is highly likely that your website, won’t be the first or last site that customers visit. So it is super important to make sure it is always in a good condition.

3- Presentation

You may not even own an online business. Your website could simply be a tool for you to showcase your skills and projects.

If you are a designer, you might have a website to showcase your design samples. If you are a web developer, you might have a website for showcasing your portfolio and development skills.

Since these are the main channels for presenting your business, it’s best to make sure they’re always in good health.

4- Security

Let’s be honest, seeing something like this, doesn’t generate a lot of confidence in your business:

With the increasing rate of cyber attacks, website security is no longer a luxury. It is a necessity!

5- SEO

If you’re also investing in SEO, the truth is, you’re not going to make it that far in the Google search results without website maintenance.

Not only will customers not want to stay on your website, but Google’s algorithms will make it as hard as possible for new customers to even find your website if your website is left alone without any technical care.

What does website maintenance include?

Now that we have talked a great deal about why website maintenance is important, let’s talk about what website maintenance actually consists of.

Website updates

Your website will be built using a wide range of tools, content management systems, databases and analytical tools. Making sure these components are working properly and kept up to date is crucial.

Website backup

According to a study by the Diffusion Group, 60% of small businesses that lose their data, close within six months.

You would be shocked to learn how effective, a normal power outage can be at wiping out months or even years of data. That is why backing up your data is so important.

There are two approaches to backing up a website. If you are a hands on person, you could do it manually or you could use website maintenance services.

Security monitoring

Security is a complex and ever-changing topic. However, there are a few things that you can do to increase the overall security of your website. 

Acquiring an SSL certificate, using up to date and secure authentication frameworks, having your site use the HTTPS protocol instead of regular HTTP, these are just a few things you can do in order to maintain your websites security. You will also need a professional to keep an eye on all this., for instance, make sure that your SSL is not expired or your website is immune to occasional attacks.

Content update

How many times have you visited an E-Commerce website in search of a product, only to find out it is not available?

That is why a significant amount of time needs to be dedicated to updating the already existing content and product lineups that are already on your website. If you don’t have someone familiar with Content Management Systems, you could purchase website maintenance services that include content update as well.

Functionality checks

This includes testing the functionality of components used by your website such as: forms, buttons, links or contacting options such as texting via WhatsApp or sharing via twitter.

Webmaster tools & reporting

It is important to regularly check your website’s webmaster and analytics tools such as Google Search Console and Google Analytics to make sure everything is working well in the eyes of Google. The reports you get can also help you optimize your marketing and sales activities.

Email services

Your business email will be your most important form of communication with your customers. So you need to make sure to filter out spam emails and check the business’s emails servers regularly.

Uptime monitoring

There are times that website servers go down for various reasons and this is often unavoidable. But you can’t attract new customers when your website is not working.  By uptime monitoring, you can ensure that your website doesn’t go down too often. You also need to respond quickly in times where your website is down.

One way of dealing with this is hiring professionals to constantly monitor your website.

Should you outsource website maintenance?

If you have the technical expertise and the time to both run a business and maintain a website, by all means go for it.

But what if you don’t have the technical knowledge or the time needed for maintaining your website?

The good news is, YOU DON’T HAVE TO! We would be more than glad to help you maintain your website and run these services for you. Which gets us to the most important part of this post.

How much does website maintenance cost?

What you ultimately end up paying depends on a few factors such as:

• Domain name
• Hosting service
• SSL certificate
• Email services
• Content volume
• Number of pages
• Website Type (E-Commerce, portfolio website and …)
• Needing design alterations

And many more that we can’t list here.

The good news is, we charge a pretty fair fee for these services. Our annual fee depending on your website will cost between 1500 and 6000 AED.

Wrap up

The bottom line is when you order a website for your business, you invest in it. Regardless of the investment amount, it’s best to take care of it as a business asset. 

Website maintenance is what will give you a significant competitive edge in a tough market. It involves everything from keeping your website’s content and infrastructure up to date, maintaining a simple and stylish design, testing your website for potential bugs to increasing security and backup.