YES. Let’s start at the beginning though…
It’s now 2023 and I think a lot of people running businesses can agree that having a website is pretty much essential (or at least incredibly helpful) to running a business in this day and age. Then a lot of people get stuck after creating a website for their business, either they’re afraid of breaking something or they just want to set it and forget it, and I get it!
But switch roles with your users for a minute, have you ever been researching a business’ services and only find old information on their website? And then you’re stuck wondering if the information just hasn’t changed and is still valid or if it’s old and outdated. Who knows.
So let’s demystify website maintenance to make it easy for you to keep up and make your user’s experience better at the same time.
Website maintenance benefits for your business
Decrease your bounce rate and keep users longer
Your users won’t stick around if they arrive on your website and see outdated content and nothing new. Maybe they wanted to book with you but they think you have no events or availability coming up.
Increase your SEO and rank higher in search results
Updating your older content will also tell Google that your content is “fresh” and can be crawled and indexed again. You can take the opportunity to review keywords at the same time and keep the information relevant.
Keep your website secure
Out-of-date plug-ins are a great culprit for website hacking! Keeping them up to date is such an easy way to ensure you’re covered on that front. Creating regular backups of your content also gives you some security that if something did go wrong, you’d be back up and running in no time.
Create trust with your users
Providing good quality, relevant and up-to-date information will make your business appear far more reliable and trustworthy to users. That’s one less barrier for them to part with their money and invest it with you.
Encourage your users to visit your website regularly and discover new content
Would you keep checking a website you know never changes and is always outdated? Probably not. Keeping things accurate and fresh with new content will encourage people to visit your website more regularly. Did you know that it’s much easier to sell to repeat visitors rather than new ones? Nurture that relationship!
Increased conversion rate, more money in your pocket!
This goes with all the other benefits listed, but keeping users who trust your company and visit your website regularly will lead to more buyers and an increase in conversion rate. Win-win for everyone.
Know what works by tracking your website’s key metrics
The best way to know what is working or not with your website and where to concentrate your efforts is to track key metrics. By knowing what people are doing on your website you can see what to fix like cart abandonments.
When is website maintenance needed?
Some maintenance tasks should be done monthly and others yearly. It’s always necessary to keep your website updated but it’s crucial when you have date-specific events happening, live bookings, ordering functions, etc.
How long does it take to maintain a website
Most tasks are quick like recording your analytics or updating your website copyright. However I strongly recommend doing a more in-depth content audit once a year to see what can be updated, which pages or articles can link to each other (Hello SEO boost!) and what can be deleted. In this case it will be more time-consuming but worth it. If you don’t want to bother with all of it, you can also hire a web designer or developer to take care of it for you! Most of us have monthly plans to handle it all.
Website maintenance tasks you should do every month
Find the complete list in this article.
Save these somewhere and get back to them every month, I suggest putting it in your calendar as a recurring event!
- Track your key analytics
- Update your events
- Update your booking calendar
- Test your contact form
- Update your plug-ins (WordPress)
- Content and database backup
- Check images for alt-tags?
- Update products and images for the season
What’s stopping you from maintaining your website regularly?
Will you add it to your schedule?
