When you first set up your business online, you have to learn how to be self-sufficient. As you continue on a growth path with your business, it may be beneficial to bring on outside professional help or consult with someone experienced with web technology for your website maintenance.
Outsourcing this vital part can go a long way toward freeing up your time for marketing, new content creation, as well as working with your clients.
Here are some tips to get you started.
How You Could Benefit From a Quality Website Maintenance Plan
Not having a website is now an outdated approach, and having “a problematic” or an outdated site isn’t good for your business and brand either. Technology changes rapidly and it is becoming harder and harder to keep up with all the updates and upgrades that your website needs to keep performing well.
And while WordPress websites seem to be easier to update with a few clicks, those automatic updates often break your site’s look or functionality, that is because many of the plugins were not tested to work together before, and will not be tested for future updates unless of course, you have a subscription to a website care plan that is delivered by a professional who would back up your site, apply the updates and test them before finalizing them.
This is a “Techie” task that more than 90% of business owners outsource.
Do you want to focus on your business instead of worrying about maintaining your website?
When you outsource your website, the people working on it will be taking care of technical aspects so that you can focus on other aspects of your business. This is the best way to maximize the benefits of an online presence for your company without causing too much stress.
What Are the Steps in Website Maintenance? A Quick Checklist
Business owners are always busy. Whether it is with business development, marketing, or running operations, there are activities that you need to attend to every day.
However, the same can’t be said for your website maintenance provider. While they are working on maintaining your site, they are not busy closing deals, sending out newsletters, and moving clients to the next stage in the funnel.
They simply focus on keeping your site secure, updated and at its top performance.
Here’s a quick checklist of some of the main aspects of Website Maintenance:
- Monitor and improve the speed of your website
Be aware of the time and place of the search you’re optimizing for. For example, if you own a B2B company and your priority keyword is your main product launch date, make sure your website loads fast as it will be competing with more local businesses as well as those optimized by Google to serve those locations first.
If possible, divide and conquer; check some basic site speed metrics (Google page speed test is a good place to start) - Keep up with updates and patches
There are a lot of website service providers out there, it is very important to understand what makes one provider better than another. It is always good to know the terminology and jargon used in marketing, copywriting, and internet marketing because you will be able to compare online marketing services based on real-world data. In our case, this is the number of updates that a website has had and the number of hours on average until a website gets hit by a major issue like an outage or a security breach. - Pro-active security and anti-spam prevention
This includes monitoring your website’s security 24/7, taking daily cloud back-ups and monitoring your forms/comments and other user content areas to check for spam and clean it. (This stops 99% of bot-generated spam submissions)
