Take a moment to answer these questions: Is your website doing what you want it to? Does it contribute to your business’s traffic and revenue? Is your website giving you a good ROI? If you answered yes to all these questions, that’s great! If you answered no to any of them, keep reading.
You might have done everything right during the website design process. Hired great professionals, made an investment, described your ideas clearly, worked on your content and SEO. But for some reason, your website still isn’t performing well.
This is a very common issue. It happens when you put a lot of work into developing a functional, attractive website, but then leave it sitting there without new content or software updates. It gets old and stale and search engines forget about it. Luckily, you can change all that.
Maintaining your website is a critical factor in its success, but many business owners neglect to do it. You should think of the initial website build as the foundation, while the ongoing maintenance is what will make your website into a fully functional and engaging creation. You can’t see your full return on investment without maintenance.
Check out these five reasons why you should be regularly updating and maintaining your website:
1. Your website gives people an impression of your business
If you’re an entrepreneur, you’ve probably been to networking events and gotten a collection of business cards. Like everyone else, the first thing you probably do is take a look at their websites. You, and every other website visitor, will form your key impressions of the business based on their website. Is the content up to date? Have they posted nothing for the past year, or let their copyright date drift into the past? Are there banners for a Christmas sale even though it’s February? These things will give people a bad impression of your business. By keeping your website fresh and frequently updated, you’ll show visitors that you care, you’re committed, and you can be trusted.
2. Improve your search engine ranking and traffic
Search engines index websites with new content more highly. Once your content gets old, it’s almost impossible to be ranked highly in Google, Bing, and other search engines. Maintaining your website means that search engines will keep crawling it and ranking you for important keywords. With software updates and fresh content, you’re giving your website a fighting chance at ranking highly for the keywords that matter for your business.
3. Make sure your website visitors return
People want to become repeat customers. Finding a new business you like can be difficult and it’s easier to repurchase or shop with the same company than to take a chance on a new one. By offering your customers up-to-date information, you make it easy for them to keep shopping with you. Regular maintenance of your website offers them the information they need to trust you and become a loyal customer instead of a once-off buyer.
4. Keep your security updated
Make sure you’re using the most recent bug fixes and security patches to keep your website safe and secure. This is particularly true if you’re using a content management system, which you should be! Hackers will target pretty much any kind of website, not just ecommerce platforms, and plant malware and Trojan. It’s easy for them to do this if you’re using old security software and your website isn’t regularly maintained. Google will delist your website if they detect malware and potential customers will be understandably angry if their devices are infected by software downloaded from your website.
5. Help your website keep up with evolving technology
The internet never stops growing and evolving. There are always new technologies and online marketing methods available, and you should make sure that your website keeps up with them. It can be tempting to let your website languish and do a big update every few years but it’s better to implement small, modern changes on a regular basis. This way, your website looks professional and can really compete.
In Conclusion
If you take care of your website, it will perform well and offer you the best return on investment. Here at A La Carte Web Services, we’re sure that we can help you maintain your website so it really benefits your business. Contact us to find out more about how we can help you get the best possible results from your website.