Business owners are sometimes put off by the idea of ongoing website maintenance.
They may think that handling the process on an in-house basis is too much of a drain on their time and their resources, and they may feel uneasy about bringing in a third-party to handle this.
However, this can lead to dangerous territory.
If you are not constantly monitoring and maintaining your website, you could be leaving yourself exposed to security vulnerabilities. What’s more, you could find that your website performance is falling behind that of your competitors.
Don’t be the mouse covering its eyes – hoping the cat will go away.
By choosing the right web maintenance partner, you will be able to trust the service they provide. This means leveraging the benefits of a great web maintenance program while retaining the peace of mind that comes from a secure and robust website.
Why is it crucial to perform constant website health checks and maintenance?
Let’s take a look at the top 5 benefits your business will gain from regular web maintenance:
Achieve peace of mind
You need to know your website inside out, enjoying a complete and thorough understanding of performance levels, user experience, and security across all of your pages. This can only come through constant monitoring and consistent maintenance in the long-term. By identifying areas for improvement ahead of time, you benefit from significant peace of mind.
It’s startling how quickly problems can begin to appear within your website structure. Any growth initiative or restructuring of your website can lead to orphaned pages or issues with site navigation. Even if your website structure remains stable, you may find that best practices change rapidly, leaving your website in the dust. Continual maintenance helps you keep pace with these changes.
Reduce costs
Pre-empting problems is always the best policy. As the old saying goes — “a stitch in time saves nine”. This is certainly true when it comes to website maintenance, as you will be able to discover problems before they get out of hand. Deploying swift, proactive fixes will save you from having to engage in full-scale repair and restructuring jobs further down the line.
There are many advantages to this, of course, but perhaps the biggest advantage is cost. It’s far more cost-effective to monitor and maintain proactively than it is to go around fighting fires. It’s also important to consider the indirect cost advantages — such as the improved customer experience you’ll be able to provide.
Maintain quality
This idea of customer experience is a crucial one. If your users are having a bad experience, as many as 88% say they would not return to your website. What’s more, 70% of online business failures are directly linked to UX. This makes the quality of your website a significant concern as you grow your business and shore up your revenue streams.
It’s difficult to guarantee high levels of quality without a program of proactive maintenance and monitoring in place. There are other benefits too, such as better SEO performance and increased conversion rates — both of which are directly linked to the quality of the experience you provide.
Eliminate downtime
If a high-quality website is at the positive end of the scale, what is at the other end? The negative end of this scale is a website that is not functioning at all, and this is where the dreaded “downtime” comes into play. Downtime is an unfortunate fact of life for business. Statistics released in 2020 show that IBM’s best performing Z servers experienced 0.62 flaws per minute during operation, with some types of server experiencing more than 40. While these flaws are swiftly and automatically corrected, they do underline the very real danger of downtime.
Business websites and systems need to be as close to 100% uptime as possible. If not, customers will grow frustrated and will head elsewhere in search of the products and services they need. A proactive program of web maintenance is a crucial asset for businesses as they seek to reach this gold standard of 100% uptime.
Secure ongoing compliance
As businesses across all industries become increasingly data-driven, the need for regulatory compliance is becoming ever more acute. Customers, partners, employees, and all other stakeholders need to be protected. This means robust measures need to be implemented to safeguard potentially sensitive data. Regulatory bodies — both here in Australia and abroad — work to ensure that the right levels of protection are in place.
If your website is unmaintained, it’s impossible to guarantee this protection. You may discover that your website and your digital properties are not in line with regulations. This may result in fines or other sanctions, loss of business, and even civil or criminal proceedings if a breach does occur. Maintenance must be implemented on a continuous basis to secure ongoing compliance.
Common issues websites face that can be prevented by proper maintenance
We’ve already touched on some of the issues that businesses face without proper web maintenance. Let’s take a look at some of the most severe:
Brand reputation
A poorly maintained website has a significant impact on the reputation of your brand. If you are not carrying out ongoing maintenance, your customers could be driven elsewhere.
Safety and security
Safety and security are ongoing issues for website operators. You need to make sure that your sensitive data is protected at all times, and that consumer trust is high. Maintenance, on an ongoing basis, helps you to make sure this is the case.
Conversion rates
You need to be securing a healthy level of conversions from your website, growing your revenue and boosting the ROI of your web design and development project. This is not going to be the case if features are broken, or if customers are getting lost on their way to conversion. Ongoing maintenance helps you keep on top of this.
Customer retention
Bringing in new customers is always crucial to the health of your business, but you need to make sure you are taking care of the customers you already have. Providing these customers with a great experience is a big part of what makes web maintenance services so critical to your company.
Regular web maintenance you can rely on
Choosing the right web maintenance partner is all about trust. You need to know that you can rely upon the expertise, skill, and diligence of your chosen partner to deliver the services you need.
This is where Kicking Pixels can help you to gain the peace of mind, security, and performance you need. We are web maintenance experts, with a strong track record of providing maintenance services to our clients.
Benefit from:
- A skilled team that remains on top of the latest developments in the fields of website maintenance.
- A friendly and personable approach — we take the time to get to know your business and the field you operate in.
- More time and resources to focus on other areas of your business.
- Reduced cost and inefficiency across the board.
Reach out to Kicking Pixels today, and let’s discuss how our web maintenance services can provide a significant advantage to your business and its web presence, or check out our website assessments and check your website health to understand your next step and options.