In this article:
- What is website maintenance?
- Are website support and maintenance the same thing?
- How often should you maintain your website?
- What are the benefits of website maintenance?
- DIY or outsourced website maintenance?
What is website maintenance?
Small business website maintenance encompasses all the tasks necessary for keeping your website up-to-date, functional, and relevant. It involves a series of actions that make sure your website operates at its best, including updating content, fixing broken links, and applying software and security updates. The benefits of website maintenance on a regular basis not only enhances user experience by improving site speed and functionality but also plays an essential role in search engine optimisation (SEO), aligning your site with current search engine criteria. Furthermore, a consistent maintenance routine can prevent potential technical issues and security vulnerabilities, safeguarding your online presence.
Let’s look at some of the most important maintenance tasks:
- Updating content: Regularly refreshing blog posts and page content
- Update the technology: Make sure your theme and plugins are up to date
- Enhancing SEO: Adjusting keywords and meta tags to stay current
- Better user experience: Making it easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for
By addressing these areas, small businesses can assure a seamless and engaging online experience for their audience.
Updating content
Regular content updates are clearly one of the benefits of website maintenance – they are critical for improving search engine rankings and keeping your website relevant and up-to-date, which, in turn, attracts more traffic. By refreshing content, businesses can reflect current trends, seasonal changes, or promotional events, ensuring your website remains appealing – and useful – to visitors. Additionally, fresh content serves as an opportunity to showcase new products or services, keeping customers informed and engaged with your business’s latest offerings. Quality content updates enhance user experience by providing valuable and informative material tailored to your target audience’s interests.
Here are 10 quick website maintenance tips to help you use content to keep your website relevant to prospective and existing customers
Include a blog. A blog is a great way to add new content regularly and relatively quickly. They are often based upon personal musings or opinions, for example you can talk about your industry, post customer reviews of products, comment on news items etc. Blogs are also great for positioning your organisation as an industry voice.
Add a ‘Meet the Team’ page. Update it regularly as people join or leave the company. Include a short profile for each team member telling people about their background, role and hobbies for example. You might even want to consider a page for each of the more senior members of staff.
Have a photo and video gallery. Your gallery may be of recently completed projects, product images, events or guides. Remember to add a description to your images because search engines don’t index photos or videos.
Highlight customer testimonials. This gives you the opportunity to keep updating with new content and is a really useful way for visitors to get a feel for you as a company and your products or services. You could create this page to allow customers to post their own reviews (with moderation settings) to keep it dynamic.
Post your newsletters online. If you send out a customer newsletter, consider posting them online a week or so after you have sent them out. You could release an article a week to extend this new material.
Include a company news section. This doesn’t have to be restricted to big announcements. It can be introducing a new staff member, saying goodbye to someone who is leaving, winning your 100th contract, charity events, new product launches – anything that may be of interest to your website visitors.
Create a ‘Resources’ page. This can include useful industry websites, links to industry statistics and other research. These are a great way to get inbound links.
Add a ‘Hints and Tips’ section. Share ‘how to’ tips and videos for your products and invite customers to submit their own. You could also add FAQs and other product or service related tips that will be useful to your readers.
Use case studies. Whether written or on video, case studies are great way to demonstrate the way you do business and the impact you have.
Create free guides. If you have a technical product or service, or you just want to create some content that your potential customers will find useful, a free guide will give them the benefit of your expertise and start to build a connection.
Plugin and theme updates
Keeping plugins and themes up-to-date is crucial for ensuring compatibility with the latest platform changes and technological advances. Updating these elements enhances security by patching vulnerabilities and protects against potential threats or attacks. These updates often include performance improvements that lead to faster loading times and a better user experience. They also offer new features and improvements, which can enhance the functionality of your website, reducing the risk of errors and downtime and ensuring visitors have a seamless experience. You need to think about:
- Compatibility: Aligns with the latest technology releases
- Security enhancements: Fixes potential vulnerabilities
- Performance boosts: Improves site speed and reliability
- New functionalities: Access to the latest features for better user interaction
Regular plugin and theme updates are essential for maintaining a dynamic and secure website environment that appeals to modern users
Enhancing SEO
SEO monitoring is an integral part of maintaining and improving search engine rankings over time. By regularly tracking your website’s SEO performance, you can identify and rectify issues such as broken links, slow page speeds, or outdated content. Keeping your website aligned with the latest search engine algorithms ensures that it remains visible and competitive. Effective SEO monitoring allows businesses to adapt their strategies based on performance data, ensuring they remain competitive online and attract more potential customers.
- Performance tracking: Monitors rankings and identifies issues for correction
- Algorithm alignment: Keeps up with changing SEO practice
- Strategic adaptation: Allows for responsive shifts in strategy
- Competitive edge: Maintains high visibility over competitors
Ensuring optimal SEO can significantly enhance a small business’s ability to attract and retain a steady stream of visitors.
Enhanced User Experience (UX)
One of the benefits of website maintenance is that it guarantees an intuitive and seamless user experience, keeping visitors engaged and encouraging return visits. By optimising performance, such as loading speed, businesses can enhance user satisfaction and decrease bounce rates.
Routine updates in design and content ensure that your website remains relevant and accurately reflects your brand, making it appealing to your target audience. Additionally, having a mobile-responsive or mobile-first site broadens its reach, enhancing overall accessibility and UX. Many small businesses forget about the importance of a good user experience – and yet it is one of the things that positively influences a website visitor to take the next step. Think about:
- Engagement: Maximising visitor interaction through seamless navigation
- Brand alignment: Maintains up-to-date brand representation
- Responsive design: Optimise site usability across all devices
- Error-free experience: Promotes complete user satisfaction from every page and interaction.
Through strategic enhancements to user experience, small businesses can gain long-term loyalty and customer satisfaction.
Are website support and maintenance the same thing?
While website support and maintenance are related, they serve distinct roles in managing your website’s effectiveness. Website support focuses on assisting users with technical issues and troubleshooting problems to ensure smooth operation. Website maintenance is about regularly updating and optimising your site to enhance performance, security, and content relevance. The benefits of website maintenance include guaranteeing that your site remains attractive to both users and search engines, propelling your business forward. For small businesses, investing in both support and maintenance is crucial for sustaining an appealing and efficient web presence.
Here’s a summary of support and maintenance.
- Different focus: Support is issue resolution, whereas maintenance is ongoing care of your site
- User assistance: Support offers direct help to users
- Operational integrity: Maintenance ensures long-term site efficiency
- Comprehensive strategy: Combining both support and maintenance strengthens online performance
By understanding the benefits of website maintenance and website support, small businesses can fortify their digital strategies and achieve impressive online performance.
How often do you need to maintain your website?
A routine maintenance schedule is essential for ensuring the security and performance of your website. Ideally, businesses should conduct a monthly check-up for updates, security patches, and backups to maintain seamless operations. Quarterly reviews are also recommended to assess website content, SEO strategies, and overall design relevance, aligning them with current business goals. Annual overhauls allow for major updates that accommodate significant business changes and aspirations. In summary:
- Monthly reviews which check security patches and ensure the website has the latest updates
- Quarterly reviews to balance the content and SEO strategies and ensure you are meeting content expectations
- Annual overhauls so you can align your online presence with your with long-term business goals
- Consistent care which enhances user experience and can improve your search rankings
With a structured maintenance plan, small businesses can enjoy a professionally polished website that effectively serves their needs and their audience’s expectations.
What are the benefits of website maintenance?
As we’ve discussed, good, regular website maintenance plays a crucial role in boosting the overall effectiveness and reputation of your online presence. It ensures an uninterrupted user experience by keeping the website functional, smooth, and efficient, improving customer satisfaction and engagement.
Regular updates not only secure your site from vulnerabilities and cyber threats but also keep it optimised for better search engine rankings. It supports consistent branding and messaging, ensuring your business maintains a professional and trustworthy appearance. Such maintenance also allows your website to evolve with changing business needs and market trends, turning your site into a powerful tool for growth and success.
Embracing the benefits of website maintenance by putting together a robust strategy is key to unlocking the full potential of your online presence. Whether it’s through enhanced security, better loading times, or up-to-date content, the benefits of regular maintenance are manifold, ensuring your website remains a valuable asset to your business.
DIY or outsourced website maintenance?
When deciding between DIY or outsourced website maintenance, it’s essential to weigh the benefits of each approach to ensure your website runs smoothly and efficiently. Opting for DIY maintenance can be cost-effective and gives you greater control and flexibility over your website’s updates. However, it requires a comprehensive understanding of web technologies and trends, which can be time-consuming.
On the other hand, outsourcing website maintenance to professionals ensures that all technical aspects, from security patches to regular backups, are expertly handled. This allows you to focus on core business activities while ensuring your website is always optimised and secure. An outsourced team is typically more adept at promptly resolving any issues, preventing potential downtimes or loss of traffic. Ultimately, the decision hinges on your budgetary constraints, technical expertise, and the amount of time you can dedicate to maintaining your website.
You might find it useful to outsource the technical side of your website to a dedicated web development company, and the content to a recommended virtual assistant. When you run a small business, using experts in these areas will ensure that your website is always working hard for you – at a lower cost than you might expect, and certainly cheaper than spending hours trying to do it all yourself. Here are some things to consider:
Cost. DIY maintenance may reduce ongoing expenses, but outsourced services often provide a predictable subscription model, eliminating unexpected costs.
Time management. DIY requires a significant time investment for updates and troubleshooting, whereas outsourcing frees up time to focus on other business areas.
Keeping up with trends. An outsourced team will stay ahead of content and online trends, which might be challenging if managing maintenance yourself.
Quality assurance. Professional support means you can rely on the quality of your service – including technical things like uploading and abiding by SEO principles – if you do this yourself, there may be errors or unexpected issues.
Scalability. Effective website maintenance can easily scale with your website’s growth, which may be challenging to manage independently as demands increase.
Focus on core business activities. One of the benefits of website maintenance outsourcing is that you can concentrate on driving your business forward without the distraction of website maintenance and marketing.
We hope you found our blog on the benefits of website maintenance useful. If you’re short on time and looking for help with web content maintenance or would like to know more about our virtual employee support services feel free to call us on 0800 994 9016 or use our contact form in the menu above.