Wouldn’t it be great if you could just create a website and then never touch it forever? As lovely as that sounds, the reality is that any website will need regular maintenance to guarantee continued online success, and regular website maintenance ensures a great user experience!
What is website maintenance?
Website maintenance is basically the monitoring of your website’s overall health and performance. It’s vital that your website is kept up-to-date in order to function at its best, this ensures that your website will retain the visitors to the site.
How is website maintenance done? Well, web maintenance consists of various different tasks, such as the updating of security software and plugins and regularly uploading fresh content, as well as assisting the marketing team and managing of ecommerce websites.
There are really two parts to web maintenance – first, there’s regular web maintenance of non-eCommerce websites, and then there’s eCommerce maintenance or the maintenance of online stores where goods are sold.
Why is Website Maintenance so important?
Without regular website maintenance, your website could suffer from totally preventable issues, such as a slow website, leads not converting, as well as becoming easier to hack, exposing it to malware. These issues affect users to your website and may even cause it to stop working completely.
Why is eCommerce Website Maintenance important?
Much like with a regular website, an eCommerce website needs a lot of love and attention to run optimally. Perhaps you’ve come across an online store that was tricky to navigate, for example you just couldn’t figure out how to add a product to the cart, or you’ve gone through the entire process only to find out that the product you really wanted is no longer in stock. These are potentially damaging issues and could affect your online authority.
What are the benefits of Website Maintenance?
Here are just some of the benefits of website maintenance services:
- Ensures that you make a great first impression
You may have heard the saying, “The first impression is a lasting impression”, so it should never be taken for granted. If your website is outdated or isn’t functioning optimally, you could lose out on valuable new leads right off the bat.
- Upholds your online reputation
Regular web maintenance ensures that your business’s online reputation is upheld, by ensuring that plugins are updated, content is still relevant, links are working, page load speed is under two seconds, and much more.
- Boosts your SEO strategy
By analyzing your web maintenance efforts, you can then add to your SEO strategy, (SEO is of course important for your website because it helps you to rank on Google, if you don’t rank well on Google, you won’t be found) so you’ll have insight into what can be improved, whether that’s content that needs updating or broken links that need fixing.
- Encourages sales
When it comes to eCommerce website maintenance, online sales are the end goal, and when your site is regularly maintained, it can encourage those sales.
Nobody likes a glitchy online store, regular web maintenance ensures that your site is bug-free and has good quality images, it also ensures that payment processes run smoothly, product descriptions are informative, up-to-date, and relevant, and there are no other errors that could deter sales.
- Ensures your website is secure
Regular web maintenance helps to protect your site from online threats, the way they help is by updating your security software and SSL certification, amongst others. Doing these tasks regularly helps to keep your website safe from hackers.
Why you should get web maintenance/management with Distil Digital
Our website maintenance service ensures our clients’ websites benefit from higher conversions, increased usability, and improved functionality that leads to greater success!Through our 3 pillars, Web Development, eCommerce & Digital Marketing, the specialists at Distil Digital are able to become the ultimate online partners for SMEs (Small-Medium Enterprises) across South Africa. Contact us & discover what we can do for you.