Website Maintenance: The Success Determinant Of Any Website

The success of any website is determined by the level of website maintenance culture imbibed and adhered to. But, most website owner thought there is nothing else to be done after their site has gone live.

They abandon it because they feel building their site is all they need to do to have online presence that would attract prospective customer to their business.

They do not know that they need to keep maintaining the site for it to do what they desire it to do. We have made such mistake in the past thinking all what we need to tap into the power of internet is to flank a website.

There is much more to be done if we want it to attract customer and then add the expected value to our business.

What is website maintenance?

We have tried to define it on our website maintenance service page as ‘the art of keeping a website up-to-date with fresh and relevant content while ensuring error-free site that is not repulsive to both targeted audience and search engine spider that connect website with potential customer‘.

A static website does not have the capacity or features and composition to generate new lead if it is not updated on a regular basis. The basic reason for creating a website should be to attract more customers.

Why it is good to maintain website

There are various reasons why it is imperative to maintain website on a regular basis. Below are just a few of the most significant reasons.

1. Relevant and up-to-date content: The new way of connecting brands with customer is through content. People don’t buy product because it is readily available.

They first seek to know how it will meet their need, they research to know how to get the best price possible, they ask series of questions about the product and how the product or services can be customized to their specific needs, and they look for reviews and recommendation from friends via social networks.

All these can only be done through a website that is updated regularly.

2. Content targeted audience: You have to rank well on SERP (Search Engine Result Page) like Google, Yahoo or Bing to have appreciable traffic to your website that could be converted to customer.

The only known way to achieve this is to constantly update your site with rich and relevant content and ensure links are not broken.

3. Website load time: People including you would migrate to another website if the site you want to reach is taking too long to open.

That’s always the case. We tend to be in a hurry whenever we browse the net. So, site owner must always ensure their website load on time so as to meet the need of the targeted audience.

4. Website platform (Program) update: It is almost compulsory to always update your website program to the latest version as soon as it is released.

Failure to do so may expose your site to unforeseen security issues and hackers especially if the website is powered by the most popular CMS – WordPress.

Even the plugin that aid your site functionality must be updated so as to have error-free site.

5. Data Backup: There is no known system that is full proof against failure. On this backdrop, it is important to backup our website from time to time if we do not want to loose all the files and data we’ve pain-stakingly gathered in less than split seconds.

The most painful part is that, you may not be able to retrieve them again once they are lost.

6. Measure your website performance: If you want your website to add value to your business, you must devise a means in which you score your input and then monitor your progress.

There are great resources some available free that you can use for this purpose, e.g. Google Analytics and Webmaster tools.

To get the best result, you must have the ability to come up with inferences from the data gathered. This should form the basis upon which future decisions are taken on the site.

How to maintain your website

There is no one for all method to do this. What is most important is to ensure you have specific time allotted either on daily or weekly basis depending on the size of your website and how often you wish to update it.

It is also good to run deep check periodically and diagnose any issue you may find in the process one after the other. It is good to itemize those issues and begin to deal with them one by one.

Sometimes, this job is outsourced probably on the ground of time constraint or it could be that there are no qualified personnel on ground or the job may be too meager to keep a staff on the payroll.

Should you want to consider outsourcing this responsibility, do not hesitate to contact us.

Conclusion: You have to develop a plan on how to maintain your website on a regular basis. You need it to have a functional website that can connect with your targeted audience and also compete effectively with thousands of other websites that desire to snatch the customer you have.