Regularly updating your website is critical for maintaining a great user experience and ensuring that everything is running smoothly. A lack of maintenance can lead to issues with outdated software, website downtime, website security, and poor performance.

Outdated Software: Is your site running on outdated CMS versions or old modules or plugins? Old software leaves your site open to crashes, bugs, incompatibility with the newest features, and exposes your business to expensive updates to fix broken code.

Website Security: Everyday hackers are scanning websites to find weaknesses. Failure to update your website’s CMS or plugins and modules makes your site vulnerable to hacking. Website maintenance is important to ensure regular security patches and software updates are installed regularly to protect your visitor information and website content from theft.

A Slow Website: Website speed not only helps improve the user’s experience on a website, it’s now a Google ranking factor, known as Core Web Vitals, that affects how your site will be ranked on search engines. 

Website Downtime: A website outage, even infrequent, can create significant damage to the site, affect website rankings, or cost your organization sales, loss of reputation, and lack of confidence in your brand.

Lack of Online Visibility: In order to drive traffic to your website, you will need to keep it regularly updated with new content to remain relevant in search engine results. Websites that are poor performing, unsecure, unresponsive on mobile devices, and outdated tend to receive lower search engine rankings. You also must keep your website regularly updated with new content in order to rank well on search engines, which can be done through weekly blog posts or other types of resources for your visitors.

Outdated Brand Image: Without regular website maintenance, your brand image also may suffer. As our reliance on the internet continues to grow, many visitors may access your brand for the first time online. Therefore, it is important to make a great first impression through a website that looks great and performs well in order to maintain a professional image.

It is important to ensure your website is updated on a recurring basis. A website maintenance team can help ensure that all of the tasks that need to be done weekly, monthly, and annually are taken care of. The list below will give you an idea of the some of these tasks:

Weekly:

• Running backups to ensure website content is saved and protected
• Making updates to any software
• Audits to check for page errors and proper redirects
• Updating content

Monthly:

• Reviewing website security and performance
• Analyzing visitor information to assess engagement and interests with a website
• Reviewing blog content for improvements in online visibility

Annually:

• Reviewing and analyzing key pages for any content updates that could improve search visibility
• Renewal of your website domain name
• Reviewing website design to ensure it remains relevant 
• Adding any new website functionalities as business needs change
• Revisions to blog content to attract new visitors
• Reviewing call to action areas to improve online conversions

Website support can be defined as fixing or identifying specific or potential issues with a website, such as debugging, broken software, backups, and ongoing monitoring. Website maintenance is defined as making proactive changes that help prevent potential issues from occurring. Website maintenance updates could include development updates, changes to content, installation of security software, improvements to functionality, or changes to a website’s design. When evaluating a digital agency, you will want to check if they offer both support and maintenance. This will ensure that issues are not only identified and resolved quickly, but also that improvements are made proactively for a better user experience.

Website Support

• Software updates
• Performance enhancements
• Fixing html coding errors or broken links
• File backups

Website Maintenance

• Content development
• Search engine optimization
• Design improvements
• Development updates
• Improvements in functionality
• Analytics review

Website hosting and website maintenance might sound similar, but it is important not to confuse the two. Managed hosting provides the server for your website, ensuring that your website performs well for your visitors. Your hosting provider should take care of any troubleshooting, perform routine back ups, and install any security software, as well as 24/7 monitoring to prevent downtime and potential issues with data loss. 

Website maintenance is a bit more complex, and includes all the elements that need to be updated, designed, or fixed on your website. This includes elements such as content management, coding updates, changes in functionality, or updates to your website design. A good website maintenance company will take the hassle out of trying to update the design or change certain features on your website.

Finding a hosting provider that also does website maintenance is the most ideal partnership. Your hosting provider will already have a basic understanding of your website due to ongoing monitoring and experience resolving issues on your website, and by offering website maintenance they will be able to make further updates to improve the functionality or design to create an overall better user experience. Having a digital agency that does both will also make communication much easier and ensure that the necessary updates and changes are made in the easiest way possible.

Having a good hosting provider is necessary if you want to reduce the amount of maintenance required for your website. Good hosting ensures that your website provides a great user experience through a well-performing and secure website. Search engines such as Google also look at overall user experience when determining search rankings, so hosting is the easiest place to start when making improvements to your website.

Website Hosting

• Routine backups
• 24/7 monitoring 
• Security patches and updates

Website Maintenance

• Content development
• Search engine optimization
• Design improvements
• Development updates
• Improvements in functionality
• Analytics review

It might seem like an additional expense, but hiring a website maintenance expert will ensure that your website stays up to date while allowing you to focus on other areas of your business.  Website maintenance requires frequent evaluation to identify any issues or opportunities for improvements. If any issues arise, they need to be addressed immediately or your website can potentially be at risk for data loss, which can be even more expensive to correct if it goes unnoticed. Having someone that provides managed support for your website will ensure that any potential issues are identified and addressed immediately, giving business owners peace of mind that their website will stay relevant and up to date. These types of professionals handle these types of tasks everyday, so they will also have the tools and skills required to handle any new issues that might arise in a timely manner. This will not only save you time, but can also save you money trying to educate yourself on how to resolve website related issues yourself.

A maintenance retainer is an ongoing agreement between a digital agency and their client to work in partnership over an extended period of time. While there might be some hesitation to commit to a long-term contract, it will actually save you money over time. The extended contract will allow the agency to familiarize themselves with your website and business needs, and provide you with the necessary monitoring and updates to keep things running smoothly. Establishing this type of relationship will also help the agency fix any issues that require immediate attention before they can turn into a more serious issue that can be even more costly to resolve (such as problems with data theft or loss). Having routine website maintenance will ensure that you can maintain a great online experience for your visitors, which will help grow your business by keeping them engaged through a website that is secure and performs well.

To determine which package works best for your business you might want to consider the following factors:

• The size of your business and rate of business growth
• The complexity of your website and how much content is on it
• Whether your website design is up to date
• Your online visibility and current search engine rankings
• Current experience with website maintenance and updates
• Time you can dedicate to website maintenance 

Before signing a contract with a website maintenance provider, you will want to ensure that confidential information for your business is kept private, and that the agency will not sell or steal any of your business or clients personal information. You will want to double check that there is a clause included in your website maintenance contract stating that all confidential information regarding your website remains private.

Alliance Interactive provides website maintenance and support services for many popular CMS systems. Our in-house team specializes in WordPress and Drupal website maintenance and support services. 

We make it easy for clients to manage, track, and get updates on your website requests. Our website maintenance company helps provide all the extra help whenever you need it.

• Tech support & security
• Routine site improvement
• WordPress & Drupal support
• Website hosting

Each website maintenance plan includes the ability to add on flex hours, which can be put towards other improvements for your website. Our clients have used the flexible hours to improve search engine visibility, digital marketing strategy, and make enhancements to their website design.

Ask the Egghead is a full service digital agency. We have over 15 years of experience handling website maintenance, hosting, and support for our clients, as well as also offering a wide range of website design, development, and digital marketing services. 

For a full list of services offered by Ask the Egghead click here: Ask the Egghead Services