In today’s world, having a successful website that generates real leads is not a static process, but an ongoing effort.
Website maintenance is essential to ensure that your company’s online presence remains attractive, functional and prominent over time. Just as companies maintain their computer equipment, web maintenance is necessary to preserve the quality of your virtual space and ensure that it is ready to receive your users.
With the digital transformation consolidated after the COVID-19 pandemic, it is more crucial than ever to strengthen the digital presence of brands. One of the essential aspects to achieve this is to take care of your most precious digital asset: your website! For this, web maintenance becomes your best ally.
Join us as we explore what this service consists of, what its advantages are and how much you should invest to ensure that your website is always in optimal conditions to attract your customers and users.
What is website maintenance?
Web maintenance encompasses all the preventive or corrective actions that are 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.
Through maintenance tasks on the elements, content, architecture, hosting and other technical aspects of your website, you can verify that your digital storefront is functional, orderly and ready to serve your users.
What is website maintenance?
Advantages of web maintenance
Your website is the backbone of your digital presence, and website maintenance plays a crucial role in reflecting the value of your brand. Here are the key advantages of investing in this process:
Correct design, content and usability errors
Trends in web design and information are constantly changing in the digital age and your website cannot be left behind, right?
Perhaps you 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, the content that was published 5 years ago may not 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 be able to have an updated website that improves user retention.
Promotes the organic positioning of your website
Do you want your website to stand out in Google SERPs? Organic positioning is the key. You will attract natural and valuable traffic. Here’s how to optimize it.
Organic positioning is all about appearing in Google search results without paying. It is vital for organic traffic, indicating relevance and trustworthiness.
Technically optimize for Google SERPs. Make crawling easy with an XML sitemap and clear URLs. Improve meta tags like meta descriptions and titles.
Loading speed is crucial. Use tools like PageSpeed Insights. Compress images, use cache and mobile optimization for speed.
Create relevant and valuable content to drive traffic. Incorporate secondary keywords naturally. Maintain quality and consistency.
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 that it is of little use to have a very worked page only once if, over time, the data, the functionalities, the design and the structure become outdated, turning it into a website that does not impact users or prepare them for sale. .
Generate more conversion opportunities
Now, offering a flawless user experience paves the way for users to be willing to walk down the sales funnel, moving through the conversion stages.
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.
For example, in the particular case of e-commerce, web maintenance gives you peace of mind knowing that the products are in the correct categories, that the shopping carts work and that the payment gateway processes the orders without problems.
All of this can mean an instant sale and a satisfied customer.
Keeps the information of your company and your clients safe
Taking into account that 64% of companies have experienced attacks on the Internet, web security is a requirement to operate in the digital ecosystem.
And it protects your pages, data and informstions, since it can not only rescue the information in the event of any eventuality, but also take the necessary actions to prevent possible attacks.
What does it imply to carry out web maintenance and in what investment and expense demand?
Web maintenance is, for the most part, an investment, since it is mainly oriented to preventive tasks that prevent extra expenses associated with the correction of problems.
Of course, at the same time it entails disbursements that we can value as “expenses”, which are those destined to solve a certain failure 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 imply? You’ll know!
Here is a brief but useful list of the jobs and processes that are part of this sustainable and indispensable practice:
- Create a backup of your website
Regardless of the hosting in which your website is hosted, the 1.0 task of web maintenance is the creation of periodic backup copies outside of these. With this covered, all other control actions can be performed.
Because? In the event of a virus, technical failure, accidental deletion, or cyberattack, backup copies give you access to your important data by serving as a backup of relevant business information.
- Review the performance of your website
And it is that just as companies maintain their computers, web maintenance is necessary to preserve the quality of your virtual space and guarantee that it is prepared to receive your users.
Now more than ever, with the digital transformation consolidated after the COVID-19 pandemic, it is essential to strengthen the digital presence of brands.
And an essential aspect in this mission is to take care of your most precious digital asset: your website! For that, as you already know, web maintenance will be your best ally.
Read on and find out what this service is about, what its advantages are and how much money you should invest to ensure that your website has its “doors open” whenever your customers and users require it.
Join us!
- Update your CMS, themes and plugins
Content managers like WordPress release updates frequently to fix bugs, fix bugs, and prevent potential security vulnerabilities. So do WordPress themes, plugins, and plugins.
So, as part of a web maintenance, updating these aspects represents significant improvements in speed, performance and, of course, security in WordPress.
- Carry out load speed tests
We know that web speed is one of the positioning factors that Google takes into consideration the most. And it is that this directly affects other indicators such as the bounce rate and the length of stay.
Hence, it is crucial to make adjustments to both your website and hosting to improve loading 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, since users demand web pages that load faster and faster.
- Examine the web architecture
Taking care of the web architecture is one of the tasks that is most often carried out in maintenance, taking into account the importance of organizing the information in the correct categories —especially for e-commerce—.
Poorly organized content is an error that can confuse your users about the step to follow within your website. However, the solution is simple: review, section by section, your web page to classify each content where it should be.
- Look for broken links
The maintenance of both internal and external links should be one of the priorities in this process, since these can be modified with small actions such as moving, modifying or deleting files.
So, the link audit should be done with a certain frequency depending on the size of your website and the frequency with which you update it. Even so, finding broken links can be a tricky task.
For that, you can use a link checker to verify the correct functioning of the links on your pages. Some of these tools are:
Dr Link Check;
Google Search Console;
CheckMyLinks;
Broken Link Checker.
- 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 poorly executed responsive design!
On the other hand, 51% of companies say that updating old content has proven to be one of the best Content Marketins more efficient.
If we take this data into consideration, you will see that web maintenance allows you to be aware of the usability changes that you must implement. For example:
introduce aesthetic changes to adapt the design to the expectations of the users;
create or remove 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 features, for example, new forms of payment if it is a virtual store;
correct errors that may appear in the mobile version of your website.
- Check SEO work
Continuing with the review of the basic actions of web maintenance, this should include carrying out an SEO audit to confirm that the keywords and other aspects of organic positioning are optimized.
Keep in mind that the Google algorithm has been updated up to 9 times per day in recent times. Therefore, you must track the performance of your site, pages and content in the SERPs through continuous improvement and positioning work.
- Renew SSL security certificates
Security certificates such as SSL protect your website from reading, modification or computer 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.
- 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 available updates on hosting and CMS, or new security patches.
Usually, these updates require specialized technical knowledge to be executed correctly the first time; even when hosting is on WordPress.
Therefore, it is recommended that you consider hiring a web maintenance service within your budget.
Hire a Web Maintenance Service
Web maintenance is both a preventive and corrective action, because even if all measures are taken to prevent errors from occurring, the truth is that incidents do occur. And when this happens, the goal is to resolve it as soon as possible.
It is important to assess the impact of your website becoming unavailable. In this scenario, having a web maintenance service allows you to receive personalized attention to resolve the incident promptly.
Also, while the developers perform maintenance tasks, you can focus on the strategic aspects of your business. As you can see, in any case, web maintenance represents an investment that can imply future savings.
How much investment does quality web maintenance require?
Logically, this question cannot be answered lightly, since everything depends on the needs of your brand and the characteristics of the website.
However, we can highlight some general factors that directly influence the level of investment in web maintenance and its profitability, such as:
Your content manager
If your website is built on one of the most popular CMS, such as WordPress mainly, PrestaShop, Magento or Drupal, the cost is usually lower compared to websites made from scratch or with little known CMS.
Your type of hosting
The types of hosting also influence the value to pay, since it will be different to work in a shared hosting with other projects outside yours —which implies a risk— than one that is exclusive for your website.
The complexity and size of your website
The price of web maintenance is also adjusted based on the complexity of the web architecture and the size of your site. If it is a personal blog, for example, it will be cheaper than an e-commerce, which can have thousands of product pages.
maintenance hours
Therefore, large websites with thousands of pages will require more hours of work from developers, as the size and severity of the problems may be proportional.
The need for personalized attention 24/7
If you want to have support in both preventive and corrective actions of web maintenance, the price of the service will increase. In a particular case, having WordPress support is an investment that, in the future, can save you headaches.
The need for personalized attention 24/7
Conclusion
Web maintenance is essential to maintain the digital presence of your brand in top condition. Through regular tasks, you ensure efficient performance, a positive user experience and solid search engine rankings.
Investing in web maintenance is investing in the continued success of your brand online. If you want to learn more about how to improve the performance of your website, we recommend you review the masterclass on website security and maintenance.
