The importance of having a website is a fact that is well understood by the majority of business owners and positively, it is easier to build websites nowadays.

Creating a site is one thing, but maintaining it is another.

And, both are very important!

Both can affect website rankings and site traffic, both require a lot of time and effort.

Website maintenance refers to the activities required to keep your website functioning optimally and properly.

It involves routine checks for issues, correcting any issues, making software updates, etc.

Importance of website maintenance

  1. Saves your business: Ignore the maintenance of your website for too long and it will cost you your valuable clients and customers, waste your time working on getting your website back online, and cost you handsomely to hire a web design agency to work with.
  2. Boosts your website security: For one, it helps with the updating of codes/software of your website which keeps the site’s data as well as your visitors’ info safe and secure.
  3. Users’ first impressions: when visitors click on your website link if your website doesn’t work properly or looks outdated, customers will click away. It will set a negative first impression of your business. If your website looks unprofessional or broken, it sets a negative impression on users and they often never visit again.
  4. Aids customer retention: In order to draw people to your site and keep users coming back, you need to perform routine maintenance on your site. This helps with eliminating broken links on your site. This, in turn, keeps your customers interested preventing them from switching over to the competition with better-maintained websites.
  5. Improves your ranking on search engines: Search engines love active websites that are fast, error-free, well-maintained, and add fresh content regularly. SEO is directly proportional to proper site maintenance. The more you actively work on your website, the better your search engine rankings will be. If you ignore it, your rankings will degenerate. Also, you regularly need to clean up the website cache which increases the loading speed.

How often should you observe maintenance activities?

Due to the high demands of the task of maintaining websites, we have divided the maintenance activities into different time periods based on their urgency to help you plan to maintain your website.

Based on your type of website and demands, some of these activities may require earlier attention or be addressed at a later period.

An expert touch on your website is best to determine when it’s best to determine the time to address any of them but on average, the following time frame is advised.

Weekly maintenance activities

These weekly activities, we recommend you observe these on your website every week.

  1. Publish new content
  2. Backup your website
  3. Update security software
  4. Remove unwanted software
  5. Update other website software
  6. Test loading speed

Monthly maintenance activities

These monthly activities, we recommend you observe these on your website every month, including some weekly activities you are yet to do.

  1. Update your contact details
  2. Review user access
  3. Change your passwords
  4. Fix broken links and errors
  5. Test all contact forms
  6. Clean out the media library
  7. Make test purchases
  8. Review website analytic

Biannual maintenance activities

These biannual activities, we recommend you observe these on your website every six months, as well as any of the weekly and monthly activities you are yet to do.

  1. Check search engine rankings
  2. Review website analytics
  3. Review your content marketing
  4. Review your digital marketing
  5. Review your email marketing

Annual maintenance activities

These annual activities, we recommend you observe these on your website every year, as well as any other weekly, monthly or biannual activities you are yet to do.

  1. Renew your domain name
  2. Renew your website hosting
  3. Renew other subscriptions
  4. Perform user testing or survey
  5. Keep header and footer details up-to-date
  6. Explore avenues for improvement

Conclusion

Some of the website maintenance activities we would outline can be performed by a non-techie site owner while others would require the help of an agency for technical support.

If you need help with any of these maintenance items, do well to contact us.

In the outline above, there are several reasons why regular maintenance is crucial for your site.

The key is to run regular check-ups to ensure every part works as it should.

This however can be daunting to you as a website owner who wants to be focused on your business activities.

This is why you need a website design agency to watch over your website and be on the ground to maintain and fix any issues that may arise.

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