website maintenance

A website maintenance plan is crucial for your business! Website maintenance refers to the tasks required to keep your website functioning properly and up to date.

By: Ricardo Sousa / 04 January 2022

6 Reasons why you need A website maintenance plan

1. The majority of customers conduct online research

Before making a purchase online, 87% of people conduct online research. People that are considering buying a product from you will likely end up on your website.

If your website gives them a negative impression of your company, they’ll likely continue their research on a competitor’s site, and you could miss out on a sale.

2. Your website informs users’ first impressions

If your website doesn’t work properly or looks outdated, customers will often click away. It will set a negative first impression of your business. If your website looks unprofessional, customers may think that your business is too.

3. Your website helps grow your sales

Your website plays a crucial role in guiding users toward making a purchase. In the case of e-commerce sites, your site facilitates purchases. If your site doesn’t work properly, you’ll miss out on potential sales.

4. Site visitors value user experience

Among consumers who have a poor user experience on a site, 89% will shop with a competitor instead. Regular maintenance prevents these poor user experiences and encourages potential customers to stay on your site, increasing your chances of making a sale.

5. A website maintenance plan improves security

According to a report by cybersecurity company Symantec, there were over 5.6 billion attempted cyber attacks in 2020, which is an increase of 600% compared to 2019.

 
Website attacks are among the most common types of attacks, with the aim of stealing sensitive data, injecting malware or spam, or taking the website offline.
 
Cyber attacks cost U.S. companies £15.4 million per year. Repairing the damage caused by cyberattacks is often costly, plus you may lose customers who no longer trust your company with their personal information.
 
Regular maintenance helps protect your site from cyber threats by keeping your security systems up to date. When you maintain your security protections, customers will feel more comfortable making purchases on your site.

 

6. Website maintenance supports your SEO strategy

If users frequently leave your website shortly after arriving on it, Google may view this as a sign that your site isn’t relevant. This increase in bounce rate can lead to lower rankings in search results, which means you’ll drive less traffic to your site.

Persistent technical issues, security issues, and outdated website design, structure, or content all contribute to diminishing your search engine rankings.

What’s the website maintenance cost?

Website maintenance costs may vary depending on the type of site. Here are a few examples of potential website maintenance costs for various types of websites:

  • A personal website will have low maintenance costs, typically from €15 to €25 per month
  • Small business website maintenance may cost up to €100 per month
  • A corporate website may have maintenance costs of €200 to €1600
  • E-commerce website maintenance costs may range from €1500 to €2500

Additional website maintenance costs

Some website maintenance costs to keep in mind include:

1. Domain name renewal

When you created your website, you purchased a domain name, which is your website’s address. For example, Google’s domain name is google.com.

 

You might pay for your domain name on a monthly or yearly basis. Domain names typically cost from €0.80 to €1 per month or €2 to €20 per year.

While a domain name typically isn’t too expensive, it’s essential to keep up with the payments so that someone else doesn’t buy your domain name.

Blog post website security

2. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate

You’ll also want to ensure that your website has an SSL certificate, which helps keep your site secure. An SSL certificate enables your site to receive and transfer sensitive information securely.

Sites that have an active SSL certificate have HTTPS, instead of HTTP, in their URL. They also have a padlock image next to the URL in many browsers.

Domain-name-SSL

Sometimes you can get an SSL certificate for free if you’re using a hosting website, but generally, you’ll pay for an SSL certificate. SSL certificates typically include features, such as higher encryption rates, which can be beneficial for businesses. Their costs range from €0.80 to €125 per month or €10 to €1500 per year.

Be sure to keep up with your SSL payments so that your certificate stays active and your site stays secure.

before; therefore, staying on top of your website maintenance game is a must.

What Includes on Your Website Maintenance Plan

1. Latest Security Updates

Security is one of the primary reasons you need to stay on top of your Website maintenance plan. Hundreds of WordPress sites are taken down by Google every week due to malware attacks. Security updates are an essential part of a website maintenance plan that ensures that your business site is constantly updated with the latest security protocols.

2. Thorough Testing

Ensuring that each process of your site works seamlessly is quite essential. The main reason behind this is if your site functions like payment gateways, contact forms, CTA buttons, etc., don’t work like they’re supposed to, your website would face a hit in terms of traffic and bounce-off rates. But, that’s not all; your sales and revenue would be affected as well.

A website maintenance plan includes regular reviews and testing of your site’s functionalities and interactive buttons to ensure its smooth and seamless working.

3. Optimisation

Optimisation is an essential aspect of today’s throat-cutting competition. No matter if you have world-class design and top-notch content on your website, if it’s not optimised as per the SEO standards, your position in the Google SERPs would gradually decline, and you’d notice a decline in leads as well.

It’s that simple; if you’re not visible to your prospects, you’re not going to make any sales. Therefore, SEO is an important part of a website maintenance plan to ensure that your site is continuously optimised to Google’s suggested criteria and is always visible to your target audience.

4. Site Backups

Having a backup of your business site is most important. This is because even a minor bug may cause your website to crash. Worst of all, a website is always at risk of losing data. In that case, if you don’t have site backups, you won’t be able to retrieve your data, and your website would be gone for good.

Therefore, regular site backups are included in the website maintenance plan to ensure that you don’t face such disasters.

5. Performance Optimisation

Website performance plays a vital role in making a website successful since it is an essential part of its UX. For example, the ideal loading speed of a website is 3-5 seconds. If your website takes more than that to load, your audience will start looking for better alternatives, and you’ll see a spike in bounce-off rates.

Therefore, website maintenance plans include speed optimisation to ensure the robust performance of your website.

Scheduled Database Maintenance

This functionality will clean up your database once a week to keep it small and optimised by performing the following tasks:

  • Perform Database Optimisation for MyISAM tables
  • Delete all automatically created posts and page drafts
  • Delete all pages and post revisions
  • Delete all posts and pages in your Trash
  • Delete all comments marked as Spam
  • Delete all expired Transients

Security reports and cyber attacks:

While there are multiple reasons why you need to consider a website maintenance plan. Also, it is worth remembering that you must stay on top of your website maintenance game. According to reports, there were over 5.6 billion attempted cyber attacks in 2020, which is an increase of 600% compared to 2019. Website attacks are among the most common types of attacks, with the aim of stealing sensitive data, injecting malware or spam, or taking the website offline.

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