Like any software, websites require maintenance to keeping the site working properly. Avoiding website maintenance is like driving a car without regular oil changes, or new brakes. While it may work for awhile, given enough time, you will run into problems, and it will become unreliable. Keeping up on website maintenance ensures that your site is ready for business, and up to date with all the latest security improvements.
You can almost think of a website as a living and breathing thing. Once your initial build is complete, the rest of the internet continues to change around it, and the web site needs to adapt. Web browsers are upgraded, new security patches and features become available. Eventually, even a website that once worked flawlessly, can become insecure and obsolete over time without regular "care and feeding". The website needs monitoring, regular security patches, and fresh content in order to continue to thrive on the internet.
There are many benefits of site maintenance:
The website performance, it’s load time, downtime and uptime, is all dependent on the underlying software functioning as they should. Well maintained platforms frequently release security patches when vulnerabilities are discovered. When these patches are not applied regularly to websites using this software, they can become a target for malicious hackers, and can result in down time for the website.
The website growth, it’s fresh content, analytics monitoring and design changes, is all dependent on someone making sure all updates to the website are done in timely and professional manner.
Before beginning any maintenance, it's important to take a backup of the site. Not every upgrade works as intended, so it's important to be able to roll things back to a stable backup in case there are any issues. We use a variety of automated tools to monitor sites for issues and available updates. We provide regular reports so that you can see the work that is being done to maintain your site. If there every happens to be any issues, or you simply need some changes made to the site, we have a support help desk where you can submit any requests.
Maintaining your site yourself could cost your more money in the long run and is best left to the professionals. Not every update works as intended, and accidently skipping steps could break your site, and be difficult to reverse. You could end up losing content, orders, or messages from clients. When websites do break, it's usually more expensive than it would have been to maintain it correctly from the start.
Why not let a website expert do what they do best, so that you can focus on what you do best? By securing an experienced web professional to update and maintain your site properly you are actually saving potential lost sales and visitors.
If you’re interested in securing a maintenance contract for your web site, contact our sales department to learn how we can keep your site in proper working order.
