Building a beautiful and functional website is great, but that’s only half the battle. Regular website maintenance ensures that the website you’ve built continues to function in the way it was intended. This also ensures that the website viewers will always have the best user experience.

To help you, we’ve put together this complete guide on what website maintenance is and why it is important.

Website maintenance is the practice of regularly checking your website for issues, errors, vulnerabilities, mistakes, and keeping it updated and relevant. This should be done on a consistent basis in order to keep your website healthy, encourage new and existing user traffic, and strengthen your SEO and Google rankings. Website maintenance can impact your business’s first impressions, SEO strategy, security and sales.

Websites should be regularly stress tested as a user to check for any errors, security vulnerabilities, broken links, mistakes and overall user experience. This is where a website maintenance package comes in.

Below is a list explaining why website maintenance is so important to the success of your website.

If your website looks outdated or things aren’t working as they should, you could be losing potential customers. Nobody likes seeing errors like the infamous “404 Page not found” error when visiting a website.

There is also a credibility/trustworthy factor. A website full of errors, broken links, and mistakes can drastically impact it’s credibility. This directly affects a brand’s credibility.  As a result, searchers will often find themselves visiting another website offering the same service instead. That is not what we want for our websites.

Ranking positively on search engines can help drive traffic to your website, bringing leads to your business. Ranking poorly can have the adverse effect, making it harder for people to find you online. In the initial stage of analysis, the Googlebot crawls your website and determines the value of your website.

Broken links and errors negatively affect your ranking. Google tries to provide searchers with the most accurate and best user experience in search results. This is included as part of their SEO starter guide for Developers. Another good idea would be to have your content updated from time to time. Google also leans towards showing more recent content higher up in searches. So updating your content from time to time can help improve your search rankings.

Lastly, and probably 1 of the most important reasons for having a website maintenance plan is security. Regularly updating all your website software, 2-factor authentication, renewing your SSL Certificate are some tools that can help you protect your website files from being compromised. If you are running an online store, it is even more imperative that you have a website maintenance plan. This is to protect sensitive information, such as passwords, customers’ private details, credit card, and banking details.

In most cases, software providers release regular updates/patches to their products to improve security by recognizing vulnerabilities and fixing them. Think of when you get a notification to update your anti-virus definitions on a PC or phone. In the case of a WordPress platform, this would be updating plugins, themes and WordPress Core.

At Symbiote Web, we implement several security measures to safeguard your website from attacks. In addition, we also implement further security measures in terms of anti-malware software, secure hosting, and security best practices.

We hope you enjoyed the read and that this article has given you a better understanding of Website Maintenance.