Having a website that generates real leads is not a one-time task. Web maintenance ensures that the image of your company on the Internet remains attractive, functional, and prominent over time.
Now more than ever, with the digital transformation consolidated after the COVID-19 pandemic. It is essential to strengthening the digital presence of brands.
For that, as you already know, web maintenance will be your best ally.
Keep reading and know what this service is about, what are its advantages. And how much money you should invest to ensure that your website has it’s “doors open”. Whenever your customers and users require it.
What is web maintenance?
Web maintenance encompasses all preventive or corrective actions carried out on a website to detect errors. That are undermining its structure, usability, or performance, in order to prevent it from deteriorating over time.
Advantages of web maintenance
You already know that your website is the backbone of your digital presence. And as such, web maintenance helps reflect the value of your brand. Specifically, these are the advantages of investing in this process:
Fix design, content, and usability errors
Trends in web design and information are transformed continuously in the digital age. And your website cannot be left behind, right?
You may have noticed that. We have gone from seeing flat websites to interactive pages. Full of visual elements that seek to capture the attention of users.
Similarly, content that was published 5 years ago may no longer be as relevant today. Both in terms of subject matter and visual experience.
In this sense, web maintenance allows you to identify the pages that require optimization in content, design, or functionalities. In this way, you will get an updated website that improves user retention.
It favors the organic positioning of your website
In the end, 53.3% of all Internet traffic is organic.
Web maintenance not only allows you to check that the front-end aspects are optimized, but that the technical SEO settings work as they should guarantee your organic traffic share.
In this process, evaluations are carried out on the loading speed, the operation of the links and buttons, the review of the responsive design, and other factors related to the positioning in Google of your website.
Ensures that the user experience is optimal
A page that loads quickly, that adapts to the size of all devices, that has updated information and that is navigable, will undoubtedly create a user experience that your visitors will want to repeat.
And it is of little use to have a much worked page only once if, over time, the data, functionalities, design, and structure become outdated, turning it into a website
Generate more conversion opportunities
Now offering a seamless user experience paves the way for users to be willing to navigate the sales funnel, moving through the stages of conversion.
If in the end, you want your visitors to fill out a form, download material, or request a quote, web maintenance helps you achieve it.
Keeps your company and customer information safe
Given that 64% of companies have experienced attacks on the Internet, Web security is a requirement to operate the digital ecosystem.
And it protects your pages, data, and information since it can not only rescue the information in any eventuality but also take the necessary actions to prevent possible attacks.
What does it imply to carry out web maintenance and in what demand investment and expense?
Web maintenance is, for the most part, an investment, since it is mainly oriented to preventive tasks that prevent extra expenses associated with correcting problems.
Of course, at the same time, it entails disbursements that we can value as “expenses”, which are those destined to solve a certain fault or deficiency in the online site.
But, for sure, how should you distribute your web maintenance budget and what kind of services and actions does it involve? You’ll know!
Here is a brief but helpful list of the jobs and processes that are part of this sustainable and essential practice:
1. Create a backup of your website
Regardless of the hosting, your website is hosted on, task 1.0 of web maintenance is the creation of periodic backups outside of them.
Why? In the event of a virus, technical failure, accidental deletion, or cyber-attack, backup copies give you access to your important data, as they serve as a backup of the relevant information of your company.
2. Check the performance of your website
Part of this inspection coincides with web performance optimizations (WPO), a series of techniques that allow you to reduce the roadblocks that affect user experience.
In particular, if your website is built on a CMS such as WordPress, you can solve its most common errors faster and easier, compared to websites that are built from scratch.
3. Update your CMS, themes, and plugins
The content management systems like WordPress released updated frequently to fix bugs, correct errors and prevent potential security vulnerabilities. So do themes, plugins, and plugins for WordPress.
4. Perform tests on the loading speed
We know that web speed is one of the ranking factors that Google takes into account the most. And it is that this directly affects other indicators such as the rebound rate and the time of permanence.
Hence, it is crucial to make adjustments to both your website and hosting to improve load time. For this, tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights or GTMetrix are used to perform load speed tests.
Optimizing this variable is essential to improve the user experience, reduce loading time and, ultimately, attract more organic traffic to your website, as users demand web pages that load faster and faster.
5. Examine web architecture
Taking care of web architecture is one of the tasks that is most often performed in maintenance, taking into account the importance of organizing information in the correct categories — especially for e-commerce.
Poorly organized content is an error that can confuse your users about what to do next on your website. However, the solution is simple: review, section by section, your web page to classify each content where it should be.
6. Look for broken links
The maintenance of both internal and external links should be one of the priorities in this process, as these can be modified with small actions such as moving, modifying, or deleting files.
Thus, the link audit should be done with a certain frequency depending on the size of your website and the periodicity with which you update it. Even so, finding broken links can be a bit of a chore.
For that, you can use a link checker to verify the correct functioning of the links on your pages. Some of these tools are:
- Google Search Console ;
- CheckMyLinks;
- Broken Link Checker.
7. Update the design, content, and functionalities
90% of Internet users have abandoned a website because it was poorly designed. This rate goes up to 93% when it comes to a poorly executed responsive design!
On the other hand, 51% of companies say that updating old content has proven to be one of the most efficient Content Marketing tactics.
If we take this data into consideration, you will see that web maintenance allows you to be aware of the changes in usability that you must implement. For example:
- introduce aesthetic changes to adapt the design to the expectations of the users
- create or delete sections and panels on pages
- update products and their information sheets – copywriting
- implement new buttons and calls to action
- renew the contents of a blog and plan the publication of new pieces
- add new functionalities, for example, new forms of payment if it is a virtual store
- Correct errors that may appear in the mobile version of your website.
8. Check SEO work
Continuing with the review of the basic actions of web maintenance, this should include carrying out an SEO audit that confirms that the keywords and other aspects of organic positioning are optimized.
Keep in mind that Google’s algorithm has been being updated up to 9 times a day in recent times. Therefore, you must track the performance of your site, pages, and content in the SERPs through a continuous work of improvement and positioning.
9. Renew SSL security certificates
Security certificates such as SSL protect your website from computer reading, modification, or theft; an essential aspect to maintain trust in your website if you capture data from your users.
Updating your HTTP protocol to HTTPS is a fundamental task to prevent alarming messages from appearing for users such as “The connection is not private “. So, in web maintenance, you must make sure to renew these certificates.
10. Eliminate security vulnerabilities that your website may present
An essential task in web maintenance is to “map” all the security vulnerabilities that your website may have, such as the delay in implementing the updates available in the hosting and the CMS, or the new security patches.
Usually, these updates require specialized technical knowledge to be executed correctly for the first time; even when the hosting is on WordPress.
Therefore, it is recommended that you consider hiring a web maintenance service within your budget.
Conclusion
All right! You already know that web maintenance is vital to take care that the digital presence of your brand is impeccable and that it offers the user experience that takes your visitors from ignorance to purchase in a few clicks.
Through these periodic tasks, you will ensure that the performance of your website attracts more organic traffic, increases conversions, thus, you are at the forefront of the variable requirements of Google and users.
