1. Website maintenance sends important information about your business.
Modern web design makes a great first impression. It signals to visitors that your business is up-to-date and assures them that your business is still active. A website with an outdated design can negatively affect both customer retention and new customer growth.
A modern website tells visitors:
- You are open for business
- Your website is safe to shop and spend time on
- You are invested in your brand image, and you’re in it for the long haul
Remember, functionality is just as important as design. A large part of website maintenance involves updates to plugins, themes, and core CMS files. If you are not tech-savvy be sure to speak with your web developer before installing any updates.
If you don’t keep up with updates forms can stop sending, sliders can stop sliding, and your web pages might be covered with empty areas where interactive content used to be.
2. Also, web maintenance will let you know when to start thinking about website redesign.
Re-designing your website is an inevitability. Luckily, an active and ongoing website maintenance plan will keep you aware of how your site is working. As issues arise your web team will be able to make adjustments such as updates to themes and widgets. However, you need to be aware of compounding website issues that may require expensive solutions.
3. Additionally, it brings visitors back to your site.
If your website is selling a product, part of your ongoing web maintenance should involve regular updates to your home page. Think of your homepage as the salesman of your website. People are going to be bored if every time they visit your salesman is saying the same thing to them. Update with new products, images, and sales to keep your customers intrigued.
4. Even the best maintained sites can’t prepare for this:
We often compare website maintenance with car maintenance. Your car needs things like oil changes and new tires to remain at peak performance. This is a helpful metaphor, but it’s not a complete picture of the importance of web maintenance.
Imagine you are doing everything you need to keep your car in tip top shape. Then, one day you get up in the morning and head down to your car. You start her up and pull out onto the street to discover that asphalt roadways have been replaced over night with marshmallows. The streets have been paved with marshmallows!
You pull into the road and just kind of sink in there. Your tires have no traction and it’s slow going. This is what can happen to your website even if you are keeping up on maintenance. Browser updates, changes in Google’s search engine algorithm, and automatic CMS updates can all alter your website’s performance.