Did you know 94% of people make their first impression of a business based on its website’s design and performance? An enormous percentage like that is hard to ignore.
So, you hire a website design and development company to create a custom website for your company. They help you plan, design, develop, test, and launch your Website. However, it’s not enough to “deliver” a website to the user. A website should be seen just like your storefront, where you routinely invest time to attract shoppers and keep secure.
Now, you might think you can handle website maintenance yourself. But what happens when within the first month, for what seems like a blink of an eye, your site has been hacked, destroyed, or deleted, with no possible way of ever restoring it? Or do you create a new page and end up messing up other pages in the process? This happens more than you can imagine.
Saving money is not worth leaving the Website open to vulnerabilities and attacks.
A careful website support and maintenance package can certainly help in these scenarios.
So, What Is Website Support and Maintenance?
Most websites require regular “check-ups” to maintain their security, site performance, and search engine optimization health. Consistent website support and maintenance is an essential part of upkeep for any website, but even more so for an eCommerce business.
If you operate a CMS-driven website, you will find that your web host will automatically update the core software to ensure that they are doing their part to keep their servers running optimally and securely. When the core software has been updated, any plugins or extensions running on your Website will need to be updated to stay current and compatible with the core.
To comply with these updates and ensure your Website doesn’t fall victim to any number of functional, security, or performance issues, you must make sure to schedule regular website maintenance with your web design company.
Every business has different methods of operation, marketing, and daily or monthly needs, and so too does their Website. Below are some of the most common reasons you need to budget for your Website’s support and maintenance plan.
7 Reasons Why You Must Have A Reliable and Professional Team To support Website:
Your Website plays a significant role in your business’s success in building a solid case for regular website support and maintenance. It’s a paramount task for various reasons, like version upgrades, regular back-ups, maintaining the database, plugin updates, removing unused plugins cleaning spam comments and never published draft posts, and much more.
A trusted website support partner can save up on your precious time and let you focus on the primary goal of growing the client base and increasing sales
1. Staying Current with Software Updates
Different kinds of updates impact a website in many ways. These updates may come from extensions or plugins used for e-commerce purposes, added or customized functionality within your web design or even SEO services, and more. There are regular updates from internet browsers, server-level updates from your web hosting platform, and search engine algorithm updates that require consistent website maintenance to stay on top of.
Some updates require manual intervention and cross-referencing with your current website configuration before updating. In contrast, others occur automatically and can affect different elements of your Website content and associated digital marketing.
Keeping current with software-related updates consumes a lot of time and energy. Engaging in a website support contract or website maintenance plan can save you time and allow you to focus on running your business instead of constantly monitoring your Website.
2. Keep Your Website Secure and Safe from Phishing attacks
If any aspects of your Website require special attention to site security or data privacy, you need professional website support. Cybersecurity is becoming increasingly essential to protect against automated bot attacks, site hacks, and privacy breaches.
According to CNBC, 43% of online attacks are now aimed at small businesses
That’s not a small enough percentage to be easily overlooked, especially for a website that serves as such a fundamental piece of your business. A website support and maintenance contract ensures that professional levels of cybersecurity and proactive measures are implemented on your Website to prevent would-be attackers from gaining access and causing damage to your business or brand.
Your web developer may also suggest employing an enterprise-level website application firewall (WAF) designed to use artificial intelligence to block malicious attacks before they happen or deploy automatic lockdown and safety measures should an attack occur.
3. Website Analytics and Data Tracking
Whatever your Website’s primary purpose may be, it’s safe to say it generates valuable customer data that can be used to improve your business. Website support and maintenance can also play a key role in helping you track and make sense of this information from month to month and utilize the data to its full potential for your company. Running regular Google Analytics reports may include highly detailed SEO reports and performance metrics on website visitors and user interactions. These metrics provide actionable ideas and recommendations for marketing, improving user experience, and optimizing various web pages, both humans and search engines alike.
When you track scroll events, page clicks, or click-through rates, you can monitor user behaviors using powerful click-mapping tools to understand how well your Website engages with your audience and converts visitors into customers. Having website support can offer invaluable data collection and reporting to help you make better business decisions and fine-tune your digital marketing.
4. Improving User Experience
User experience is affected by many factors within a website. Page load time, broken internal or external links, broken page layouts, or unexpected functionality or interactions all impact your users’ experience on each web page. All these metrics factor into your core web vitals score and send a signal to search engines and humans to gauge the authority and effectiveness of your Website.
Your Website should also adhere to common accessibility standards to ensure all visitors can browse and navigate your Website efficiently. It also becomes essential to keep up with Google algorithm updates on website optimization. Website support and maintenance services can help serve both objectives.
The best way to ensure a great user experience on your site is to invest in a professional website design. To maintain that optimized experience, you should perform regular updates and make sure to take advantage of website support and maintenance packages.
5. Making It Mobile-Friendly
With over 5 billion people on mobile devices, it’s a no-brainer that your Website needs to be mobile-friendly.
Although your site may not have billions of visitors (or even millions right now), the odds are that a very significant portion of your web traffic comes via mobile devices.
The US is now a smartphone society.
In 2020, mobile devices drove 61% of visits to the websites in the US.
If you consider this stat with the mobile-first indexing update from Google, ignoring the mobile market will become a perilous affair because it prioritizes mobile experiences over desktops/PCs.
The best way to optimize your site for mobile and stay on top of the constant evolution of devices and viewports is with a professional web design support contract.
Apple, for example, releases two new iPhone models per year. Many of these new devices feature different screen sizes from one generation to the next. Keeping up with these changes in the physical environment your Website is expected to perform in is a choice every website owner must make. There is a need to identify the fluid breakpoints between device generations to ensure that changes like this carry minimal impact on the websites we create for you and keep your maintenance costs lower.
6. Driving Financial Savings
You might think you will save money if you and your staff maintain the site yourselves. But just like your car, it costs more to fix it if an issue arises than it does to maintain it properly. Regular oil changes help keep your vehicle running correctly; website support and maintenance help keep your Website up and running correctly.
Furthermore, significant issues can create higher costs. Having a reliable website development company to maintain and back up your site as part of a monthly care plan reassures you. If your site is not on a support and maintenance plan and something breaks, agencies charge you an hourly rate to fix it. That cost could exceed the price of a monthly care plan and most likely will.
7. Save Yourself Time
Plain and straightforward, updating your Website yourself will take you longer than it takes us. Why? Because it’s our expertise — it’s what we do every day. Especially if we have designed and developed your site, we will already know how it’s built, where to find certain things, and how to optimize the site without causing any negative domino effects most effectively. Time is money. Performing your own website maintenance and support will keep you from doing more important tasks.
8. Add New Features To The Website
The website support services will also facilitate adding new features based on ever-evolving technology or customers’ requests while helping you keep an edge over your competition.
Way Forward
Biggest takeaway? Don’t allow your investment to go to waste! It’s not always a good idea to choose to rely on yourself for your business’ website support and maintenance. A true website support and maintenance partner can be highly beneficial because they will be with you not only during the creation of your new Website but with you for the lifetime of your business, growing with you every month.
Comprehending the value of professional website support services helps put website ownership in perspective and allows businesses to set their annual operating budgets. Contact us today to learn more about our website support packages and how regular website support services can provide the stability you need to grow your business.