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Maintaining the Integrity and Security of Your Marketing Investment necessitates regular website maintenance.
Did you know that 94% of consumers form their initial impression of a company or brand based on the look and feel of its website? It's difficult to ignore such a large percentage. If you've ever dismissed the value of website design, now is the time to reconsider your position on the value of professional website design and an optimized user experience.
Setting up a decent website for your company or brand can be difficult, and it's best left to the professionals. A website will almost always require long-term website care after launch, thus you should include a website maintenance plan in your annual operational budget. Once your new website is up and running and ready to serve as the foundation for your digital marketing, it's critical to stay on top of web maintenance activities to guarantee you're providing the best possible experience for your visitors and maintaining a safe website that people can rely on.
What Is Website Maintenance and Support?
To preserve their security, site performance, and search engine optimization health, most websites, including custom WordPress websites, require regular "check-ups." Consistent website maintenance is an important aspect of any website's upkeep, but it's especially important for an eCommerce shop. If you run a CMS-based website, you'll notice that your web host will update the core software on a regular basis to guarantee that their servers are working smoothly and securely. Any plugins or extensions running on your website will need to be updated once the core software has been updated to keep current and compatible with the core.
You must arrange frequent website maintenance with your web design business to comply with these upgrades and guarantee that your website does not suffer from any number of functional, security, or performance difficulties. Every business, as well as their website, has its own set of operational, marketing, and daily or monthly requirements. The following are some of the most prevalent reasons why you should budget for a website maintenance plan.
Staying Current With Software Updates
Different kinds of updates have various effects on a website. These changes could come from e-commerce extensions or plugins, new or customized functionality within your web design, or even SEO services, among other things. There are also regular browser upgrades, server-level updates from your web hosting company, and search engine algorithm updates to keep up with, all of which necessitate ongoing website maintenance.
Some upgrades require manual intervention and cross-referencing with your present website configuration before being implemented, while others happen automatically and can have an impact on many aspects of your website content and digital marketing.
It takes a lot of time and effort to stay on top of software upgrades. Engaging in a website support contract or website maintenance plan with your web design agency will help you save time and focus on operating your business rather than always monitoring your website and stressing over your digital marketing.
Keep Your Website Secure and Safe From Harm
You'll need the help of a professional web developer if any components of your website necessitate extra attention to site security or data privacy. To protect against automated bot assaults, site intrusions, and privacy breaches, cybersecurity is becoming increasingly crucial. In fact, small businesses made up 43% of last year's privacy victims.
That isn't a small enough percentage to be neglected, especially because your website is such an important part of your brand. A web maintenance contract ensures that your website has professional levels of cybersecurity and proactive safeguards in place to prevent would-be criminals from getting access and damaging your business or brand.
Your web developer may also recommend using an enterprise-level website application firewall (WAF), such as Cloudflare, which uses artificial intelligence to prevent malicious attacks or implement automatic shutdown and safety measures in the event of an attack.
Website Analytics and Data Tracking
Whatever the primary goal of your website is, it's reasonable to say that it creates important customer data that may be used to better your business. Website maintenance can also help you keep track of and make sense of this data month after month, allowing you to maximize the data's value for your business. Regularly reviewing Google analytics data can reveal highly thorough SEO reports as well as performance information on website visitors and user interactions.
These analytics provide actionable ideas and recommendations for marketing, user experience improvement, and optimizing various webpages for both humans and search engines. When you employ strong click-mapping tools to measure scroll events, page clicks, and click-through rates, you can learn how well your website is connecting with your audience and converting visitors into buyers. A website support agreement with your web design firm can provide vital data collection and reporting to assist you in making better business decisions and fine-tuning your digital marketing strategy.
Improving User Experience
A website's user experience is influenced by a variety of things. The user experience on each web page is influenced by page load speed, broken internal or external links, broken page layouts, and unexpected functionality or interactions. All of these indicators contribute to your overall web vitals score and provide a signal to search engines and humans about your website's authority and performance.
To ensure that all users can efficiently explore and navigate your website, it should also adhere to common accessibility standards. Today, accessibility is a hot topic in web design, and keeping up with accessibility requirements necessitates regular website maintenance activities from your developer.
Investing in a professional website design is the greatest approach to assure a positive user experience on your site. To keep that optimum experience, make sure to update your website on a regular basis and take advantage of one of your web designer's maintenance services.
Making It Mobile-Friendly
With over 5 billion people using mobile devices, having a mobile-friendly website is a no-brainer. Even if your site does not already have billions (or even millions) of visitors, chances are that mobile devices account for a considerable amount of your web traffic. A professional web design support contract is the ideal method to optimize your site for mobile and remain on top of the constant evolution of devices and viewports.
Every year, Apple, for example, introduces two new iPhone models. From one generation to the next, many of these new devices have variable screen sizes. Every website owner must make the decision to keep up with these changes in the physical environment in which their website is supposed to work. Our web design team has a tried-and-true process for detecting the fluid breakpoints across device generations to ensure that changes like this have a minimum impact on the websites we build for our clients, lowering their maintenance expenses.
WordPress Maintenance
If your website is powered by WordPress, you'll almost certainly require more specialized assistance, as there are numerous methods to further optimize and fine-tune a PHP-driven website to produce the results your company has grown to expect. Extensions and customized plugins will work smoothly and efficiently at all times with a tailored WordPress maintenance contract.
Because the open-source content management system powers one-third of all websites on the internet today, it naturally attracts more attention from malicious bots and hackers than less popular content management systems. Our WordPress experts have been working with the CMS for just under a decade and have created one of the most comprehensive and trusted WordPress security guides available.
Do I Need a Website Support Contract?
Weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly duties must all be performed. Keeping track of all of these responsibilities may soon turn into a full-time job for any business owner who wants to keep a well-maintained website up and running for their clients or consumers. One of the most common queries we get is, "What does website maintenance entail?" To be clear, it's not an easy topic to answer because every website is different in terms of design and functionality.
There are, however, various methods to website maintenance services, and many web designers can work with their clients to adapt maintenance plans to their small business's needs and budget. We can divide site maintenance into four categories based on the type of maintenance and assistance your website requires.
Weekly Updates
Top-level items on your website should be examined once a week. Your pages must load correctly with no errors or broken links. Any contact or lead generation forms must work properly and send data to the appropriate inbox or CRM platform.
If you've saved spam comments or posts in your content database, you'll need to delete them. 404 errors must be resolved or redirected, and content such as blog posts and plugins may need to be updated.
If your web host does not provide automated daily backups, you'll need to restore your site after making all of these changes. To protect against content and data loss, this process saves the previous version of your site.
Monthly Maintenance
A high-level audit of your content is required every month. Determine which posts or pages need to be optimized, which should be removed, and whether any potential keyword gaps in your digital marketing need to be filled. You should have a regular process in place to evaluate your website analytics and identify anything that could cause performance or page experience issues, in addition to auditing content.
Many cloud-based SEO services or tools can be easily integrated into your website to automate this type of analysis and provide itemized website health reports to you and your team. These tools can detect a variety of issues on your website, allowing you to quickly prioritize and address problems before they become serious, such as:
- Checking SSL certificates
- Available or recommended security updates
- Content audit
- Customer engagement and behaviour
- Search engine optimization rankings
- Search engine visibility
- Usability and accessibility
- Social media mentions
- Security scans
- Page speed and performance
- And more
The majority of business owners have a large list of key marketing and sales data to examine and act on. Rather than spending time and money researching the best analytics tools and learning how to use them effectively, it might be in your best interest to hire a web design and development expert to do these chores for you. Web specialists also have the training and experience to interpret the data and collaborate with you to streamline monthly goals and keep website maintenance expenses low.
Quarterly Support and Maintenance
In addition to routine software and plugin updates, it's a good idea to evaluate your website from top to bottom once a quarter. To further optimize your website's performance and search engine visibility, you should examine the present site structure, information, and explore changes to the user interface design and enhancements.
While you're reviewing content, take a look at your current digital marketing and ad campaigns to see if there are any changes that need to be made to make better use of keywords and visual design elements. Conversion rates can be improved by making minor, data-driven changes to on-page elements like popups, web forms, and other calls to action.
While you're reviewing content, take a look at your current digital marketing and ad campaigns to see if there are any changes that need to be made to make better use of keywords and visual design elements. Conversion rates can be improved by making minor, data-driven changes to on-page elements like popups, web forms, and other calls to action.
Annual Website Maintenance
Although annual website maintenance is simple, it takes longer than other types of maintenance. It entails a thorough examination of the site's content, keyword strategy, and design. The content audit may also include the replacement of any dated references from the current year with references from the following year.
Perform more rigorous audits for correctness, grammar, typos, and relevance while revisiting your web material, as concepts and best practices may have evolved since you last released this information.
Check your SSL certificate's renewal date to guarantee it doesn't expire abruptly, leaving your website vulnerable to insecure connections.
After that, take a look at your content stats. Make any necessary modifications to high-performing material. Determine which content needs to be removed, repurposed, or rewritten in order to improve your search rankings and provide more value to your audience.
Make sure your domain name is renewed before it expires. To declutter your server, review active email addresses and delete any that are no longer in use.
If your identity or marketing goals have changed in the last year, you may want to consider a more extensive website overhaul.
How Much Does It Cost to Maintain a Website?
The cost of website maintenance varies from company to company and website to website. However, because it is evident at this point how much time, effort, and money goes into a well-maintained website, there are a few aspects to consider when researching website maintenance plans before committing to any website maintenance services. These include:
- Purpose and size of your website
- Level of custom content
- Scalability of services for business growth
- Experience with website maintenance
- Priority for website support and update
- The time needed for maintaining your site
- What type of maintenance best suits your budget
Careful consideration of these factors, as well as your site maintenance budget, can aid you in selecting the best package for your company. To avoid overpaying for a website maintenance plan, evaluate the average website maintenance costs first. Cost can also be broken down by a variety of criteria.
- Domain name and renewal – dependent on your web host’s pricing, package, and fees; often runs R100 to R750 annually
- Web hosting – varies by hosting needs (shared, virtual private server, dedicated, cloud, managed) from R50 to several thousand rands per month
- Site architecture updates – fixed pricing or as-needed maintenance for updates and testing
- Content – hiring freelancers or paying staff for content creation
- SEO services – working with an SEO specialist for on-page SEO (separate from website design, off-page SEO)
Each of these aspects varies depending on the level of assistance required. The size of your organization, your digital marketing approach, and whether or not you operate an eCommerce website or portal that contains private user data are all factors that influence your budget and pricing.
Website Maintenance Cost and Tiers
How much does it cost to keep a website up to date? That is a trick question. The size and planned use of your site have a direct impact on the cost of support. The larger your site is and the more complicated the features it contains, the more website maintenance fees you should expect to pay every month.
Personal Blogs or Portfolio Sites
A site of this size is unlikely to receive more than a few hundred monthly visitors. At this level, hosting and domain registration are relatively inexpensive, and content generation is often handled by the website owner through a content management system.
It is possible to keep costs low for a personal blog or portfolio site, and owners can easily explore free tools and templates to lower website maintenance costs until the site generates more cash. In these cases, fully customized plugins or an SSL certificate are significantly less common.
Anti-spam plugins and content creation are going to be your top priorities. The investment in website upkeep starts here, with tiny regular backup health checks.
Other costs remain minimal until you begin paying more per month in digital marketing and paid advertising, which will propel you to the next tier of website support.
Small Business Sites
If your website generates revenue for your organization, you will almost certainly need to invest in extra technical support. You'll need to look into a more comprehensive maintenance plan that includes things like software updates, SEO marketing advice, and quality assurance testing. You'll want to make sure you plan ahead of time before your website gets too large to maintain at this point.
Standard eCommerce Sites
Any e-commerce site that is a regular revenue source needs to perform smoothly and efficiently without any downtime or major issues. If your firm relies on online sales to generate cash, you should strongly consider hiring professional web support. Entrusting the maintenance and upkeep of your website to a professional web design business can help you prevent big issues with your online cash stream, whether they are related to the online checkout process or not.
A typical eCommerce site does not require as much upkeep as a more robust or complex transaction-based website, but it does necessitate frequent web maintenance.
Custom eCommerce Sites
A customized eCommerce site necessitates round-the-clock assistance. This is the type of website that demands check-ins on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis. Without a maintenance plan in place, a site like this can easily go off the rails, leaving you unable to make sales and crippling your revenue stream, as well as a costly price tag to fix the site once the damage has been done.
Hiring the Right Company for Website Maintenance
Understanding the value of professional website maintenance services can help business owners not only put their website ownership into perspective, but also determine their annual operating budgets. We specialize in custom WordPress design and development at Dsignr Digital, and with every website we produce, we include 30 days of free website maintenance and support. This post-launch support period allows us to better predict the type of care each website will need in the future, as well as get insight into the value and importance of professional website maintenance services to our clients.
Contact us today to learn more about our unique website design and development process, as well as how regular website maintenance can provide your business the stability it requires to flourish.
