How A Lack Of Website Maintenance Can Hurt Your Business
When you ignore your website for long periods of time, it becomes vulnerable to hackers. You run the risk of high bounce rates, malware, security breaches, and a wealth of other issues. Many businesses handle sensitive consumer information to fulfill orders and other operations. Phone numbers are often required for performing services, and home addresses are needed for most companies. When security breaches happen, you lose valuable information and the trust of your customers.
You may think that scaling back or eliminating website maintenance is an excellent way to optimize time and cut costs, but this isn’t the case. Just because something is working now doesn’t mean it’ll function in a week, month, or year. During the time that you’re neglecting your website, it could be infected with malware. Fixing a malware infection is extremely expensive, as most issues involve your website being hacked into and altered. The best way to combat this is through continued maintenance.
Websites Need Routine Attention
Websites are, in many ways, living things, constantly growing and changing. Very much like tending to a garden, consistent maintenance is also necessary for a website to continue to grow. You need to update the website’s plugins and software, check for broken links or images, perform routine security checks, update content for SEO, and do a laundry list of other things. By keeping up with maintenance, you’re preventing issues before they happen.
Doing weekly, monthly, or quarterly website maintenance tasks can be a pain, however. You may want to handle these tasks in-house, but you should focus on your business rather than its website. Many businesses partner with reliable website development companies that can perform these website maintenance tasks for them. We’ve compiled a list of things that will be impacted if you neglect your website.
Website User Experience (UX)
The user experience of a website can be the difference between a bounce and a conversion. Keeping things that benefit users in working order will help in many ways. Internal links, loading speed, and accessibility all require consistent maintenance to get the most out of them. If users notice problems before you do, they will bounce to your competitor rather than continue looking through your site.
Accessibility is arguably one of the most important parts of user experience. Your website should be accessible to all, and every searcher should be able to make purchases with ease. If you don’t have an easy way for everyone to contact you, you’re likely missing out on hundreds of leads. By ignoring your website maintenance, you risk plugins that help with accessibility becoming broken and useless.
Even if users can get what they need while using a broken website, it’s unlikely they’ll become returning customers. This means your business’ reputation will become an issue. Your website must be reliable and professional to give searchers a great first impression of your business. Building your customer base requires website maintenance.
Search Marketing And SEO
Google and other search engines prioritize websites that are well taken care of. This means they feature new content regularly, maintain security measures, and receive regular updates. This process is SEO, or search engine optimization. Not giving your website the attention it needs will lead to certain key pages or features going down. While this affects UX, that’s not the only way it can affect your website. When certain pages are down, those pages may become de-indexed. This will negatively impact the ranking of your whole site, causing your incoming traffic to fall.
Even if pages don’t go down, your rank on Google will still fall without consistently checking your core web vitals, like loading speed and downtime. A business’s reputation is a primary qualifying factor for ranking. If your website isn’t maintained well, your business will lose the good reputation you’ve built up for a long time.
Disaster Recovery
A big part of website maintenance is backups. Without consistently backing up your website, you risk losing progress on your improvements. If you don’t have a backup at all, you’ll lose the website. By backing up your website, you ensure the data is safe in case of a complete website crash or a cyber-attack.
Missing an update for your plugins, themes, or PHP will leave your website vulnerable to malware attacks. If you leave this alone for too long, your website will be hacked, and search engines will likely flag it for malware. By consistently monitoring PHP versions and security issues, you’ll ensure that no hacker can alter your website and make it unsafe for visitors.
Routine website maintenance will cost you less in the long run. You’ll also be able to maintain a website that is smooth and easy to use for your customers.
Get Better Conversion Rates
A website that is easy to navigate and lightning-quick is integral to getting the most out of it. Consumers expect to have a clear layout that’s easy to navigate. A slow website with a confusing layout is a recipe for high bounce rates. For example, if your lead form was down and someone interested in your services was on your site, they wouldn’t be able to contact you.
Converting people from searchers to leads is the most important job a website has. When you ignore site maintenance, you risk people losing interest or not being able to convert. Consistently performing maintenance tasks will help improve user experience and keep them on longer. You also ensure that those interested in your business can easily convert to leads.
Get The Maintenance Your Website Needs
Routine maintenance tasks can be incredibly difficult and time-consuming to get through, but they are also integral to the functioning of your website. Getting a professional web designer to take care of your maintenance gives you a functioning website without the hassle. Just A Web Company is a digital marketing firm that can handle everything from website maintenance to designing a brand-new website for your business. Our team of experts is ready to help you, so why wait? Call our office today to set up your appointment!
