What is Website Maintenance and Why Do You Need It?

So, you’ve designed and built a website for your business. You might think that this is where the website side of things ends.

Although this may be enough to keep a basic website online and useable, the truth is there’s a lot of other things involved if you want to keep your website up and running, performing optimally, and achieving success in the long-term. Website maintenance is just one of these things.

Website maintenance covers all the things you need to do to keep your website working correctly and performing well. It is typically undertaken by web developers, who will review your website and make any required fixes or changes in line with your website maintenance plan.

Web maintenance includes things like:

• Regularly checking and performing website testing to ensure correct functioning
• Fixing broken links, 404 errors, and other technical issues
• Making security updates to ensure website security, including fixing any known vulnerabilities or issues
• Updating website content to remove any content that is outdated or no longer relevant, and adding new, more relevant content
• Making updates to your website design
• Installing new software updates
• Improving your site’s SEO to improve your search engine ranking and drive traffic growth
• Increasing responsiveness and loading speeds
• Creating new reCAPTCHAs to combat spam
• Keeping plug-ins up-to-date
• Updating SSL certificates
• Renewing your hosting service to keep your website online
• Monitoring and reporting on your website’s performance
• Performing regular back-ups
• Making other changes to make your website’s user experience and functionality better
• Providing emergency technical support (for example, if your website goes down, glitches, or is hacked)

Having a regular website maintenance schedule is one of the biggest keys to running and maintaining any successful website. If you don’t keep your website properly maintained, you are at a higher risk of experiencing security breaches, technical glitches, outages, and other issues. 

As a result, your user experience is likely to be poorer. All of these things could cost you business and revenue in the long-term.

Although you might see website maintenance as just another cost for your business, it is important to remember that the costs of lost sales, business, and revenue as a result of a poorly functioning website will far exceed regular website maintenance costs. 

The cost to repair complex technical issues or to provide an extensive update on your website in future could also work out to be more costly down the track, compared to if you had kept the website properly maintained to begin with.

As with many things, prevention is always better than a cure, so it’s better that you invest in the proper website maintenance and support from the get-go to prevent issues from cropping up down the track. 

At Tomedia, we’re passionate about the importance of regular website maintenance. We offer a comprehensive range of web maintenance packages at a variety of price points, so that we can support the maintenance needs of businesses of all sizes. Find out more about the website maintenance services we offer here.