Website maintenance is the act of regularly checking your website for issues and mistakes and keeping it updated and relevant. This should be done on a consistent basis in order to keep your website healthy, encourage continued traffic growth, and strengthen your SEO and Google rankings.

Keeping a website well maintained and attractive is important to companies big and small in order to engage and retain customers. It’s easy for businesses, especially startups, to cut corners and let a few tasks slide. Website maintenance can easily become one of those things as it doesn’t always present immediate issues. However, just like your health can fall apart if you go too long without a regular check up, so can the health of your website.

Regular monitoring of your website is a must for keeping your business running smoothly.

Many new businesses already have a lot on their plates without worrying about constantly checking in on their website. It’s tempting to buy a domain name, throw up something temporary, and just worry about it later. There are many reasons why this is not a good idea. Maintaining a current, healthy, and active website is important for a number of reasons.

The whole point to starting a business is to have customers, clients, or an audience. To drive traffic to your website, you’ll need to keep it regularly updated. Google wants to rank websites that have the most relevant and up-to-date information on their search engine results page . They may even de-index your website entirely if it hasn’t been updated recently enough and if they suspect it has been infected by malware. You must keep your website regularly updated with current content, news, keywords, and articles in order to rank well in search results. Regularly website maintenance is invaluable for SEO strategy.

If your website is gaining traction and traffic, it’s important to keep those potential customers. If they aren’t able to find what they are looking for, current information and relevant content, there is a good chance you’ll lose interest quickly. In order for your website to be the useful tool you want, you’ll need to ensure it is free from typos and grammar issues, has any and all information a customer could want, and looks engaging and consistent.

This is the single most important reason to keep website maintenance on your radar, particularly if your website is storing any form of customer information. If you are using a website building platform like WordPress or Wix, you must ensure that you are installing regular software updates and security patches. It can be easy and attractive for hackers to find and target websites that have sat dormant for too long.

It’s becoming more and more simple to create a website that looks well-designed and professional. There is an expectation for a professional website from professional companies. If your website doesn’t deliver on the promise of professionalism, your customers will often go elsewhere.

Your website is a very important element of your business. If it is up-to-date and running smoothly, it can be a valuable support and asset. If it is not in a good state, it can cost you dearly. Once you are behind on your maintenance needs, it can be quite the process to bring the website back up to speed. Sometimes, if your maintenance has been ignored for too long, it is easier just to scrap everything and rebuild from the scratch. Do yourself and your business a favor by staying on top of your website. This will repay you with simple ease of mind.

The sleeker your website is, the more you’ll convince potential customers that you are their ultimate choice. If you’re staying on top of your website maintenance, you’ll also have the opportunity to be an early adopter of new website technology that will help the back-end run more smoothly. If you’re installing software updates regularly, you’ll be able to take advantage of new features that install along with the updates.

You’ll also be able to tweak your design to stay on top of the latest website looks. It’s far more tempting to employ a company with a polished and modern website than one that looks like it hopped on a time travel device from 2003.

Now that we’ve established that website maintenance is a must for websites of any size, it’s time to discuss the advantages to employing someone else to do that maintenance. You can, of course, take on these tasks yourself, but it will save time and stress to pay an agency for several reasons.

1. You’ll be hiring a team of experts who take care of these tasks every day. They know what to look for and what to expect.
2. You can focus on other areas of your business that need your attention.
3. Hiring an outside agency is cost-effective and can scale with your company. Your package will reflect the needs of your company.

There are several elements that go into determining whether you should purchase a website maintenance package.

1. The size of your website
2. The purpose of your website
3. How much of your website is customized content
4. How quickly is your business growing?
5. How much experience do you have with website maintenance?
6. Is your website currently out-of-date?
7. How much time do you have to dedicate to website maintenance?

1. Check that all of your pages are loading without errors
2. Run a backup and make sure a previous version of your site is stored
3. Make updates to website software and plugins
4. Check that all of your forms are running properly
5. Remove any spam comments from pages and posts
6. Check your pages to see if there are any broken links
7. Search for 404 errors and fix or redirect
8. Write one or more blog posts to keep your community engaged and encourage SEO traffic.

1. Check the load speed of your website and ensure that nothing is bogging it down
2. Review your security scans and make sure nothing is out of place
3. Analyze website statistics from the previous month
4. Check your blog to see if there are any articles that could be updated.

1. Review your website design and structure  – can be it improved?
2. Check graphics and images – should anything be updated?
3. Review SEO and meta titles and descriptions to ensure they are as effective as possible
4. Test and tweak popups, forms, and calls to action
5. Review your workload for efficiencies to see if anything can be automated
6. Test your website on all devices and browsers to see if it displays correctly
7. Review advertising and marketing campaigns to see if anything needs to be changed or updated.
8. Restore a previous version of the website to check your backup health

1. Update any reference to the current year
2. Review each page for content accuracy, grammar, typos, and relevancy
3. Check any active email addresses and see if any are excessive and can be deleted
4. Ensure that your website domain name is renewed
5. Consider whether a website design update is due
6. Review all of your top performing blog articles and see if they can be updated with new content