Types & Importance of Website Maintenance
Every website is built for a purpose which includes selling a product, sharing valuable information, email marketing and providing services. Without taking into account the website ‘s purpose, it should be properly maintained.
To ensure that your website is achieving its goal, website maintenance and support is important. Web maintenance includes different tasks such as checking website traffic, updating content and making sure that your website is secure.
Beside the purpose of the website, you should also know what is website maintenance and what’s its importance? Now, we are going to explain web page maintenance and how to keep your website running smoothly. We will also explain different types of maintenance site internet that are required to do on a day to day basis.
What is Website Maintenance?
Website support and maintenance is a process of ensuring that the website is updated, performing well and optimally while monitoring the website’s overall health. It is about making sure that website is engaging, and getting website visitors.
Web site management includes checking the website links if they are working properly, content is updated while also fixing broken links. Let’s understand the types of maintenance site web in some simple steps:
Types of Web Maintenance:
After your website is launched, it’s necessary to perform website maintenance and support on a regular basis which keeps you updated with the current situation of your website. It helps you to analyze the technical issues, enhance user experience while also ensure that your website is ranking on SERPs (search engine result pages).
Web page maintenance may seem a difficult task to do but it’s important to keep your website running smoothly. There are different types of website managing which are explained below:
Security Updates:
Security updates are maintained by website development companies to ensure that the website or software is vulnerabilities free. Security updates are important to keep your website safe from hackers and malware so, updating your security is important.
Plugin, Theme and CMS Updates:
To maintain your website’s security, it is important that your website has the latest version of CMS. With this, plugins and CMS are also important for a website’s functionality and keeping them up-to-date should be your priority to ensure it is compatible with latest web browsers and security updates.
Content Updates:
Keeping your website’s content updated is also important to ensure it’s relevant and precise. This involves adding new blogs, adding or updating product descriptions and updating the existing content. Outdated content can create a bad impact and it also looks unprofessional so updating it is very important.
Fixing Broken Links:
One of the biggest hurdles for a positive customer experience is a broken link on your website when one of its pages is ranking. Broken links not only affect your user experience but also create a negative impact on your site’s SEO rankings. Hence, it is crucial to find the broken links as soon as possible. For this, you can use different SEO tools like Ahrefs, or SEMRush and fix them before they encounter any of your visitors or customers.
Backups and Recovery:
Having a backup prepared is really important to be prepared for worst scenarios. Disasters can happen at any time so it’s smart to have a plan for the worst case scenario. Having a backup of regular code and content can help you minimize the data loss risk which can take place because of domain errors, cyber attacks, or accidental deletion of content.
Back up can be done manually and automatically as well. For larger or heavy websites, backing up data frequently is important while for smaller websites backing up on a monthly basis is important. These recovery planning can quickly help you to get your data back and prevent data loss if it’s hacked or corrupted.
Performance Optimization:
Checking website performance is essential to identify any problem and take necessary actions on time to keep the website running smoothly. Optimizing the performance enhances the website’s responsiveness and speed. It includes improving webpage loading time, optimizing image size and cleaning unnecessary code.
Security Scanning:
In website maintenance and support, security scanning is considered very important as it keeps the website secure from cyber threats. Scanning the website regularly can help you identify and fix security issues on time before it starts causing damage to your website. This ensures that your website is risk free and secure.
You can also improve user experience by scanning the website. By fixing potential cyber threats, you will be sure that your information is safe with your website.
User Management:
If your site has users then managing their accounts is crucial. Managing accounts means creating, deleting user accounts, managing permissions and passwords and resetting it if important. Managing users also includes cleaning spam accounts and bots.
Accessibility Testing:
A website’s accessibility test is an important thing to consider to ensure that everyone can easily use your website means users can use it on mobile devices, desktops and with slow internet without any issue.
SEO Monitoring:
You should make sure that your website is SEO friendly and visible in search engines. To make sure SEO best practices are followed, you should monitor your site’s SEO. Monitoring website’s SEO includes monitoring website’s ranking, backlinks and traffic. Monitoring your website’s SEO can help you analyze SEO problems and track your progress.
How to Maintain a Website?
As you know what is website maintenance and the types of maintenance site web, now we will understand how to maintain a website for your business either if it’s a small business or a large business. So, here are some points that you should consider for maintaining your website:
- Apply security updates on your website to make your website protected from cyber attacks.
- Back-up your website regularly or monthly (as per your site requirements) to protect it from data loss.
- Keep track of your website’s performance and monitor it regularly to make sure it’s loading quickly and functioning properly.
- It’s important to keep your content fresh and engaging for the visitors. Always try to add new pages, update existing or outdated content and add blog posts as well.
Importance of Website Maintenance:
Web page maintenance has a great impact on your business because of its first impression, SEO strategy, security and sales. Whether it’s a google bot or a user, whenever they come they should see the impact that your website is creating. To understand the importance of maintenance of website, analyze the given points thoroughly:
Customer’s Online Research:
It is confirmed that people do research online before buying anything. People that are thinking about buying something from your website will certainly end up on your site. If by any chance your website gives your user a negative impression then they will certainly move to your competitor website and you could lose a potential buyer.
First Impression:
If your website does not look professional or have an outdated design or something else then customers will likely move out of your website and go to another. A customer’s first impression is important, if your customer is clicking on your website then he should be attracted enough to make a purchase. Hence, web site management is important to take care of this first impression.
Enhance Sales:
Web maintenance also helps to boost sales. It plays a significant role in guiding users to make a purchase. For an ecommerce website, loading times matters a lot so your website should be working properly. Hence, web page maintenance boosts sales and compels customers to make a purchase afterwards.
User Experience:
User experience is an integral part for any e-commerce website. If your customer has a poor experience on your website, he will end up on your competitor’s website. Regularly maintaining your website can minimize the chances of poor user experience, encourage potential customers to stay on site and increase sales.
Cost of Small Business Website Maintenance Plans:
Larger businesses may have more expense on maintenance site internet but as per for small businesses, it varies. There are some additional prices for maintenance site web that small businesses have to bear which are:
Domain Name Renewal:
Whenever you create a website, you buy a domain name or you may say it as your site’s address. For instance, Google domain name is google .com and amazon has a domain name of amazon .com. Similarly your website also has a domain name which depends on the type of your website.
The cost of domain name varies as it can cost from $0.08 to $1 per month or $2 to $20 per year. Domain name is not too expensive so it is important to pay on a monthly or yearly basis so someone else cannot buy your domain name.
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificate:
Besides buying a domain name, you should be sure that your website has an SSL certificate. SSL certificate is the abbreviation for secure sockets layer which keeps your website secure. Websites having an SSL certificate have an HTTPS rather than HTTP in the URL and a padlock image can also be seen with the URL in most of the browsers. SSL certificate helps to receive and transfer sensitive information safely hence, it is a must have thing for websites.
Buying an SSL certificate also depends on your hosting website. Some websites give the SSL certificate for free along with the website hosting. However, for some websites you have to pay for an SSL certificate. The cost for an SSL certificate ranges between $0.08 to $125 per month or $10 to $1500 per year. Be sure to update your SSL certificate’s payment to keep your website safe. It’s also important to get traffic as Google doesn’t allow its users to enter a website with no SSL certificate.
Website Hosting:
Website hosting is another cost to consider if you want to run your website. You can either host your website on your own or you can hire a web hosting provider.
If we talk about website hosting providers then you have several options. You can get a shared hosting in which your website shares a server with several other websites. It’s much cheaper with $24 to $120 per year.
If you choose a virtual private server or VPS, you still have to share a server with several other websites and it costs $240 to $600 per year approximately but if you buy a dedicated server then you will get full access to your server and its cost range between $1200 to $24000 per year.
How Often is Maintenance of Website Required?
The requirement of maintenance site internet depends on different factors like website’s purpose and complexity. Although, it is important to do maintenance site web on a regular basis to keep it functioning properly.
- If you have attached your website with Google analytics then you would access your user information such as user’s demographics, and behaviour. So, here you would do weekly website support and maintenance by determining the areas of improvement and fixing the issues afterwards.
- Monthly web managing tasks include checking that all online platforms are secure with updated plugins and content is backed up. This will help you to retain your information without having the fear of losing it.
- Quarterly website maintenance and support tasks include reviewing the content of your website and understanding if it really fulfills the goals. Also check if it is following the metrics such as getting organic traffic, having backlinks (SEO), having page views with low bounce rates, engagement with conversion rates and ROI.
- Now for annual website management tasks, you have to check the renewal dates of your domain name, web hosting server, and any additional costs for your website managing.
Also update your website’s header, footer and legal policy section if required. Don’t use outdated information on your website as it can leave a bad impression. Also, change the old logos and change it with new and more attractive logos. With some time, there’s also a need to redesign the website, so do it. Always be sure that your website is updated and has an appealing design that really attracts visitors.