Website maintenance is the process of routinely monitoring and checking your website for issues like broken links, poor readability, or misspellings that can negatively impact its performance and provide a poor user experience.
It is simply an act of keeping any website error-free and up-to-date, as well as performing optimally. Website maintenance typically involves tasks like making regular backups, publishing updated content, and fixing any broken links.
It also involves more general tasks like regularly administering your site’s overall performance or adding visuals to your page. If you own an online business, you should know that maintaining a website is necessary for its growth and sustenance.
Therefore, in this article, we will delve into the significance of website maintenance and explain why making your site run smoothly is essential.
We will also try to cover the different types of web maintenance and give you some tips on how to manage them in order to keep your site properly functional.
Why Does Website Maintenance Hold Great Significance?
Regularly maintaining your site is crucial to ensure that your site is running at its optimum potential. Properly maintaining your site also have various additional benefits, such as:
1. It Boosts Site Traffic
Search engines highly rank websites that are updated regularly in order to provide visitors with the best quality content. Therefore, by regularly publishing updated content, you can increase your site’s visibility. It will also help make your content appear at the top of search results when your target audiences search for relevant keywords.
Hence, fresh and regularly updated content is not just for the benefit of readers and customers. It also greatly influences your site’s SEO, visibility, and ranking of your site across platforms like Google.
2. It Improves Security
Security is another one of the most significant reasons why website maintenance is so important. If your organization uses a Content Management System such as WordPress, you need to ensure that your site keeps up with all the security updates and software patches. If you fail to do so, it can give hackers easy access to your site, which allows them to steal your data.
Different Types Of Website Maintenance
Website maintenance services are tactics to help keep any website fully functional and updated. Here are some different types of web maintenance services through which you can improve the overall quality and performance of your site.
1. Performance Monitoring and Optimization
Routinely monitoring your website’s performance can certainly help you determine potential problems and take steps to keep your site running properly and smoothly. Optimizing your website’s performance can also help improve your site’s loading time and responsiveness.
2. Website Loading Time
Page load time is the amount of time a web page usually requires to completely load. It is one of the main factors that indicate the web page’s performance. A slow loading time can negatively impact user experience and, ultimately, business performance.
Therefore, regularly checking your website loading time is essential as it will allow you to avoid any stumbling blocks and fix them in the first instance. You should check your website’s loading time after every few weeks.
3. Software Updates
Software updates should be considered a compulsory aspect in the maintenance of any website. Checking for software updates is the best way to ensure your website’s security is maintained.
However, software updates should be developed between the launch of the new software and the removal of the old one. This can ensure that your site is regularly updated and in a safe and protected zone.
4. User Management
User management is another factor in website maintenance that should not be ignored. If your website has users, you need to manage their accounts. This typically involves resetting users’ passwords, creating and deleting their accounts, and managing permissions. User management might also include tasks like cleaning the users’ list by deleting spam accounts.
5. Accessibility Testing
Accessibility testing refers to the act of making your website usable and accessible to the maximum number of people. It makes any site accessible to individuals with disabilities, such as people having hearing disabilities, vision impairment, and other physical or cognitive conditions.
Testing your website’s accessibility is also crucial to ensure that people with slow or poor internet connections can easily access and use your website as well.
FAQs:
1. How Much Does Website Maintenance Cost?
On average, the charges of website maintenance range between $35 to $5,000 a month, depending on the size of your audience, how much content it hosts, and what your website is particularly used for. These charges usually cover a number of website elements.
Here are some maintenance costs of different websites:
- A personal website usually requires relatively low maintenance costs, that generally range from $5 to $25 per month.
- The costs of small business website maintenance may range up to $100 per month.
- Corporate website maintenance costs can be anywhere between $200 to $3500 monthly.
- E-commerce website maintenance costs might fluctuate between $1500 to $2500.
2. How Do I Manage Website Maintenance?
Here are the five steps to follow to perform routine website maintenance:
- Backup Your Site
- Check for Updates
- Dig Into the Analytics
- Don’t Neglect Your Content
- Perform Usual Usability Testing
