3 reasons why you should have a website maintenance strategy in place

Website maintenance is crucial for your business especially with frequently changing technologies and algorithm.  One of the ways to help your business grow online will be to have a website maintenance strategy in place as in order to get better results from your website, it should be seen as an ongoing project and here are 3 reasons why.

Fresh & updated content

By updating your website content frequently, it keeps your audience informed and updated about the company. By keeping your audience engaged with fresh informative content, their loyalty and trust in your brand will continue to grow which turns into recurring traffic, providing more opportunity for conversion. By making sure the information on your website is up to date, this will help prevent loss of business.

For example, if you move premises but don’t reflect this on the company’s website because you don’t have a website maintenance in place, people will be going to the wrong address meaning you lose out on potential business. Finally, by providing high quality up-to-date informative content, you will be perceived as an industry expert by your viewers/audience making you the go-to source in your sector.

SEO

Part of your website maintenance strategy should involve Search Engine Optimisation because it is pointless having the best website in the world if nobody can find it. As mentioned in point number one, if you update your content regularly there will be frequent indexing on your website. The more you update your site with articles, the more Google bot will stop by to visit your website.

Some of your website maintenance SEO activities should include:

• Identifying and removing duplicated content – Duplicate content is seen as spam. If your website has duplicate content issues, based on the current Google Algorithm, your website will be penalised.
• Finding broken links on your site – Broken links can affect and harm your rankings especially if you’ve got a lot of such pages. These can be fixed by redirecting the broken pages to the new URL.
• Identifying loading speed issues – Website loading times have become crucial especially with many users visiting your website from their phones. An average user expects a website to load up in 2 to 3 seconds.

Security

You wouldn’t leave your house without putting some security measures in place like setting your alarm and or locking your door. Therefore it should be the same on your website. You need to make sure that your website is secure. To do this, it is important to perform updates to your framework and plugins. For example, if the latest version has a security patch on it and your site isn’t updated to this version, unwanted users could gain entry into your site through the security breach found in the previous version.

Another way of making sure your website is secure is to periodically check the server logs for any abnormalities and creating back-ups of your site. By doing these, your website is less likely to be breached.