Why do we need website maintenance?
You have a website, they have a website – in 2021, almost every business has a website. And many businesses have had websites since the early 2000’s, even the 90’s. However, websites are good for more than just selling products and relaying information to the world outside of your company. A good website offers goods and services with easy access and UI for new visitors, but also an overall mission statement about the brand’s values and identity. These positive messages can be lost if a website has an outdated design profile, glitchy usability, and a vague communication of the business’s purpose. Communicating with customers does not always come in the form of front-facing marketing. Sometimes cleaning the services and image you offer online can increase your effectiveness, convincing users to stick with your brand and business after a single visit. With a straightforward website unaffected by common programming bugs, you can garner positive customer reviews and put your best foot forward to investors and business partners. Here are a few web-based concerns and strategies you may employ to put website maintenance on par with your other financial priorities. Good maintenance makes sure users have no lag, no downtime – and can meet their needs quickly.
Aspects to Address and Actionable Strategies for Website Maintenance
- Security:- As progressions in cyber security continue to advance, keeping your web application or website up to date becomes a priority for ensuring your site’s health and safety. Cyber security measures may be growing, but the skills and capabilities of bots and hackers also continues to grow. As hackers become smarter, you want to make sure your website is protected. Another priority for a business should be disaster recovery. If a crisis hits your system, is it ready to adapt and counteract the crisis? If something happens to your source program, and crises can happen to all business when they least expect a crisis, will your backup work? Considering these questions as you implement ongoing web maintenance can help you stay prepared even for worst case scenarios, like a security breach or a blackout. With a backup program or server built through regular web maintenance, your website can be better prepared.
- Staying Up to Date with the Latest Software:- At this point it is simply a fact: applying updates and development to your website allows it to perform to an optimum level for longer. Even a few weeks downtime can leave a website in the dust, depending on if there are any major updates to platforms and software during that time. Thinking about updating your software regularly, and not just when you get around to it, can keep your web presence healthy and thriving.
- Reducing Website Downtime:- Users hate waiting on pages for too long, and too much downtime from a site can drive them away from your business. With web maintenance, you can clear up the major bugs that arise in your server and website, and make sure your users are traveling through your site downtime-free.
Your website’s speed and performance depend on your servers and domain host. Making sure you update your website’s software, themes and plugins can help your website run smoothly as users interact with it, and provide a positive experience for the user. If you know ahead of time your database will be facing an issue, you can optimize the database and regularly check log files to make sure the programs are running.
If your server is almost full, you need to clean it up
High Quality Data Tracking and Monitoring
Web maintenance can also mean website data monitoring. By keeping track of user behavior through tools like pixels, you can make the necessary updates to your website to adapt to what users like best about your site. You can cut out any unnecessary screens, and optimize your UI/UX to get your user from the homepage to the checkout page as seamlessly as possible. During web data monitoring, you can analyze and make changes to your website’s UI, layout or design based on metrics, which include but are not limited to:
- Hits
- Page views
- Click through rate
- Overall customer journey reports
Development of Brand Identity
How a website works and feels can influence a user’s perception of your brand. To call attention to your business’s vision and values, you want to not only place a mission statement page somewhere on your site. More than that though you want to implement periodic changes in your website to show that you are still relevant. If a user visits your page once, then visits it a year later, you want to be sure that he, she or they see something new. Your website shapes how your audience of potential clients interacts with your brand, and how a website works and looks can tell a person a lot about your business as a whole.
How OST Can Help
Regular web maintenance does not sound particularly appealing or sexy, but it can help your business stay functional and fresh. Furthermore, routine checks and maintenance costs much less than attempting to recover from a breach in cyber security. As a full provider of website maintenance and optimization, OST is happy to help your long-term website development based on your needs. It is important to give your users the gift of a streamlined website or web application, and hiring a firm that can handle regular web maintenance can positively influence your ROI in the long term.
