Your website is up and running. It has a great layout, incredible images, and some valuable content. Now, should you focus on other tasks and come back to your website in a few months or should you maintain it?
The answer is simple. You must maintain and manage your website. When you set your website up and forget about it, the site begins to lose its value, it falls in the search engine rankings, and you will not keep traffic. Here are a few reasons why regular maintenance is so crucial to the success of your website.
Stay in Good Standing with Google
One of the biggest reasons to maintain your website is to make Google happy. Each time you add content to your website or make any updates to it, Google sends its Google-bots to reevaluate your website, run it through Google’s algorithms, and move it up in the search engine rankings. When you fail to update it, you lose out on these opportunities and you begin to fall in the rankings. Most people will only click on the top five page results, so the farther down you fall in the rankings, the more your website is going to suffer.
Retain Customers
A website is designed to attract, inform, and engage individuals. When a website doesn’t offer anything new to readers, they are less likely to revisit the site. This doesn’t mean you must perform major updates to your website. Instead, you should be adding blog posts, ensuring contact information and pricing is correct, as well as any other information that is available on your site.
Don’t Forget About the Security
While many individuals think that maintaining a website is only about managing and updating the content on the site, they are wrong. Today, updating and maintaining strong security measures is as vital. Cybercriminals and hackers are not always looking for the big score. Instead, they are looking for information that is easy to access. Hackers can detect flaws in your systems and they know their way around basic security measures. You want to update your security measures to stay one step ahead. Even if you are a small business, you are still a target for many cyber criminals.
Keep Links Active
When maintaining your website, you want to make sure using the site is flawless. When users run into navigation problems, errors, broken links, etc., they are quick to leave and look for information elsewhere. By maintaining your website, you should look for any broken links or flaws that users could run across. Plus, you don’t have to spend time checking each link manually. There are many applications that will look for any broken links on your website for you. Yet, you must take the time to do it.
If you don’t have the time, knowledge, or the motivation to maintain and manage your website, hire someone who does. At Diffactory, we can help you manage your website and reap the rewards. Contact us today to book a strategy session.