In a perfect world, you’d be able to create your dream website, you’d make it live to the world and that would be it, fantastic right? But it’s not a perfect world, and things can, and will go lopsided if left unmanaged, so just like most things in life, websites need maintenance to continue to operate smoothly.
Small online business owners often avoid having to hire a website manager to keep costs down (and sometimes they’re just unaware that it’s even necessary), but doing so could prove to be a problem.
Not only will you be at a disadvantage to your competitors, but there are some serious security risks that you’ll be leaving yourself exposed to. Website management is not just for big business owners with large websites, its necessary for all websites.
Here are the benefits of website management, including some of the risks you’ll be avoiding when choosing website maintenance for your website:
5 Benefits of Website Management
- Improve Security
Security is the absolute number one reason you should have website maintenance. Regular website maintenance ensures that your website is always on track with software patches and security updates. But what happens when a website isn’t properly maintained? Well, without regular web maintenance, hackers are able to take advantage of vulnerable code and steal data from your site, which could prove to be a huge hassle to fix.
- Boost Site Traffic
Google ensures that searchers find only the best quality content, so websites that are regularly updated are given better rankings, which increases the visibility of those websites. This means your content has a higher chance of appearing when searchers type in the relevant keywords.
- Keep software updated
Websites need regular updating of their core software, this includes updating of plugins and themes. Doing this correctly is important, you should always perform a backup beforehand so that if any issues arise, you’ll be able to get your previous working website version back up and running.
- Keep content updated
The content on your website needs to be regularly updated. Outdated content on your website looks very unprofessional, so when you have regular website maintenance performed, this is something that unsurprisingly will also have to be done. Remember, keeping your content relevant, helps optimise your user experience.
- Backup
All sites will need to be backed up regularly, this is to ensure that when issues arise, the website can easily be rebuilt, this includes all code as well as your website’s content. Each and every time you update your website, your code will need to be backed up as well because if you don’t have any backups to restore from, you’ll have to recreate everything from scratch.
Why SEO agencies should offer website maintenance
It’s imperative that SEO agencies offer website maintenance as a service. If they don’t, they’ll be shooting themselves in the foot. If anything happens to your website it can seriously hurt your SEO rankings.
Because your rankings in search results aren’t permanent fixtures, SEO is always an ongoing strategy. When performing SEO maintenance, you’ll already be updating content and checking for broken links, so it won’t hurt to also check the website in its entirety and update the plugins and everything else that goes along with web maintenance.
As an SEO agency, you’ll find that it’s important to ensure that you cover all your bases by making reliable and regular website maintenance available to your clients.
