The importance of having a website is a fact that is well understood by all (mostly) business owners worldwide. However, what they fail to understand is that website maintenance is equally important. Ignoring the proper maintenance of your website for too long will not just cost you your valuable clients and customers but will severely affect your business’ bottom line.
There are several reasons why website maintenance is considered so important for the growth of your business.
1 – Keep your code/software up to date
It is important to keep the code/software of your website up to date so that your site’s data, as well as your visitors’ info, are safe and secure.
Updating the site also helps with eliminating the chances of any broken links or links that redirect to any unrelated pages. This, in turn, keeps your customers happy and prevent them from getting frustrated and switching over to the competition with their better-maintained websites.
Nowadays, no one can really say that their website is ‘complete’. It doesn’t matter how much time you contribute, how much money you spend, there’s always some room left for improvement. That’s why it is highly recommended to update your website with fresh content and on a regular basis to help engage and grow your audience.
2 – Back up regulary
Backing up all of your site’s files is one of the primary tasks of website maintenance services which can be accomplished either manually or included in the automated services offered by your web hosting provider. And it is essential too, considering the time and money it will consume in rebuilding your website from scratch in the case of any mishappenings such as a natural disaster or any malware attack. Believe me, losing all your site’s information (that you spent months working on) in the blink of an eye is the last thing you want to happen.
A tip: backing up your data once a month is sufficient for simple informational websites, however, more complex e-commerce websites require backing up more frequently.
Majority of websites nowadays depend on specific software and run on thousands of lines of code and as we know, these codes come with their own set of vulnerabilities. What hackers do is take advantage of these vulnerabilities in order to exploit such sites.
What you can do to prevent this from happening to your site is updating your website’s software as well as your web hosting server’s software with security patches and latest releases. Though getting your site hacked with all the security measures in place can never be ruled out as an impossibility. But, if that happens, you will be in a far better position to recover yourself if you have followed the protocols and kept up with regular maintenance.
3 – Google will love you
It’s a well-known fact that search engines love active websites that are fast, error-free, well maintained and add fresh content regularly. Hiring a web development company for website maintenance will ensure that the content being uploaded is correct and up to date. Also, it includes the regular cleaning up of cache that automatically increases the loading speed of your website.
Just keep in mind that the SEO is directly proportional to the site maintenance, the more often you maintain, the better your search engine rankings will be. Ignore it and the rankings will degenerate, who knows Google might even remove your site from its search results if it happens to detect any malware due to negligence.
As I have said before, there are several reasons why regular maintenance is crucial for your site. I have tried to cover as many as possible but still, when you fall into the practice of maintaining your website, you will realize there is much more to this than meets the eye. The key is just to run regular check-ups on your site to ensure everything is as it should be. But how can you be sure of that? Unless you partner yourself with experts who can help you build your dream website that can guarantee long-term success.
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I love your posts – they are short, to the point and with immediate takeaways, Karmen! Keeping software up to date is so crucial to prevent hackers. And of course, big bonus, Google likes everything fresh! Most important though, is the back up to avoid heartbreak!
Thank you Vidya 🙂 I love to “educate” and help out, at least with things I am familiar to 🙂
As always I love your advice and tips! I am just learning that website maintenance is crucial! I have a question about theme updates…when it says on my dashboard to update my theme should I do it? I don’t want to mess up anything and it says something about having a child theme which I don’t have. hmm…I really like my theme and don’t want to mess it up lol. How can I guarantee it won’t once I update? Or is there no guarantee?
Before updating your theme you should always check what is new in this update. Mostly it’s just minor changes, but recently they started updating PHP compatibility, so before updating you must be sure your server and WP version is prepared for this update.
Using a child theme is important if you make some changes to the actual code or css of the main theme. If you don’t do that, then you don’t need a child theme 🙂
And remember, ALWAYS back up your site before every update! 🙂 Because if you don’t have a backup and your theme breaks you have only two solutions: 1) find the php/code error and fix it (and I know how hard that can be sometimes) or 2) revert to default WP theme, upload your template again and start designing all over again (and that is just a pain)
Hi Karmen I actually ran a backup the other day. One tends to forget about these important things. Thanx for reminding us. I appreciate your help a lot
I’m guilty of forgetting to back up my site. I wouldn’t even know where to start. Do have any advice on how to do it with Squarespace?
Thank you for these great tips Karmen. I do know that if you don’t keep your website well maintained and updated that you are at risk of being hacked. It is scary stuff, I would hate for one of my sites to get hacked!
Explained the article so nicely and in detail that anyone who will read this will surely make his website go for website maintenance, you also explained the importance of website maintenance and its perks that will render in future in the form of google ranking and how important it is to be listed in the rankings and keep on getting promoted.
Thank you. Website maintenance really is important.
I recently found many useful information in your website especially this blog page. Among the lots of comments on your articles. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you for reading it and finding it valuable 🙂
Your blog has explained each and everything so nicely and I am really happy that I came across your blog. Your post is really very beautiful and informative as I have gained lot of information through your article. Keeping the website updated is the most important factor because we would not want to show old information or irrelevant things to our customers and security check is also very important to protect website from hackers.
Yes, maintenance is very important. There are also a lot of other things to look out for, but it all falls under the maintenance domain.