Website Maintenance 101

Your welcome page is digital perfection, your product pages are flawless, and your about us page is personable and warm. Now that your website is completely set up and live, youre finished with the job, right?… Well, not quite.

Website maintenance is a vital part of managing your own site, as its the only way to ensure that your pages continue to run smoothly and offer value to your clients. This is true for all websites, large and small, and for all types of business.

While its certainly good to update your site with new content and products or services, we are specifically talking about the non-so-attractive technical side of things.

Why its so important to maintain your website

There are a number of ‘technical’ reasons why it is so important, but today we want to take you through the four basic ones.

1. It keeps your website safe, for you and your customers

Safety maintenance includes performing regular updates to plugins, themes, and core software (which in our case is WordPress). Together, these steps will avoid security vulnerabilities that hackers can use to inject malicious code into your system or take control of the site. Failing to complete these tasks is one of the main reasons sites experience security breaches, so its also important to complete regular security checks to detect any signs of hacking.

2. It ensures your features function optimally

All websites include basic functions, such as online stores, contact forms, booking systems, buttons, etc. Without regular updates, these functions may experience issues, which can stop a customer from contacting you, making a purchase, or booking an appointment.

3. It makes your business look professional

Many customers will visit a website to learn more about a business before getting in touch or making a purchase, so its important that the website exudes professionalism. Should the customer find broken links, missing pages, or other technical issues, they may think your product or service is similarly problematic.

4. It keeps your content safe

Any website may be at risk of being infected or hacked, and in this worst case scenario, the best solution is often to completely clean the whole system up and then restore the entire site. This is where a recent back up will save the day. A back up should be performed regularly, and it should contain your content, settings, and website structure, so you dont need to go through the whole website set up all over again to get back online.

Our website care plans

Between managing a business, dealing with customers and ensuring quality across your products and services, we understand that website maintenance may not be at the top of your priority list. Thats why weve created professional maintenance plans to save you website headaches.

We currently have three different website maintenance plans on offer, depending on the level of assistance you prefer. To give you an idea of what we can do for you, listed below are the basic technical maintenance tasks we complete for our clients through our care plans:

• Weekly WP, plugins and themes updates
• Daily Backups, kept in two different places
• 24/7 Uptime Monitor
• Database cleaning and optimization
• Perform security checks
• Monthly website reports
• Basic email support to answer any questions

You can check more details about our Website Care Plans here.

Note that we also offer a Website Care Boost option, which provides a one-off service for maintenance tasks, available to those clients who are not ready or keen on signing up for a monthly care plan.

We have been performing these maintenance tasks for clients for over two years, and have proudly ensured their websites never lapse in safety, functionality, or professionalism.

Get in touch if you want to know more.