After your website has been designed and developed it’s important to look after it.
Just like a car, your website needs regular maintenance to ensure it runs and performs as you would expect it to. Your website is an important investment, and to have a secure, stable and reliable online presence is critical.
Okay, so what are the options for web maintenance?
1. Do nothing
Sadly, hackers are always coming up with new ways to cause harm to websites. If you do nothing there is always the potential to be on the receiving end of an attempt to harm your website (and your business).
Cost: high
Fixing a problem is more expensive than maintaining
Risk: high
Your website may be vulnerable to hackers, and over time will get outdated and may not perform as well as it could
Time commitment: none
No maintenance requires no time commitment in the short term, but in the long term it can cause many time-consuming issues.
2. Do it yourself
If you learn how to build a website you may feel confident to perform the maintenance yourself. In order to do this, you would need to commit around 100 hours to become more competent than an absolute beginner (the 100 hour rule).
Cost: low
…although fixing a problem can often be more expensive than maintaining
Risk: high
Like building a house, the wrong foundations can cause issues with your site if the infrastructure is not built on a sound platform
Time commitment: lots
5+ hours a month for maintenance update, plus additional learning time
3. Let us help you
We will ensure your website is kept up to date with the latest plugins, is backed up on a daily basis and is secured to minimise the risk of hacking. We can monitor your search engine optimisation (SEO), update content and ensure your website is optimised to provide the best user experience.
Cost: medium
From securing your site to giving it the best chance to appear in search engines, we can provide a solution to meet your requirements.
Risk: low
We can offer our technical expertise to update your website safely and securely, and ensure it is kept up-to-date.
Time commitment: low
You only need to contact us if you need assistance or have any questions. We are here to help.
What’s involved in web maintenance?
- Updating plugins and themes
Core frameworks regularly bring out new releases, which need to be updated to keep your site secure and running smoothly. - Security
Keeping your security plugins up-to-date will minimise the chance of your website being hacked and will help to block malicious content. - Backups
For peace of mind, backing up your site on a regular basis will ensure all of the content is securely backed up. - Optimisation
Making sure your website is optimised will improve loading times and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), and in turn will help towards delivering greater revenue. - Content changes
It’s important to keep your content relevant and current. This will allow search engines to frequently index your website, which will help towards your Google ranking and search traffic.
If you choose not to maintain your website, it increases the chances of your site breaking, which is much harder to fix than keeping it maintained in the first place! The reality is that websites need looking after on an ongoing basis to minimise the chance of this happening.
