Why Website Maintenance is Necessary after Development

You’ve finally launched your website that you’ve been working on for months (or maybe years); you’re so excited that this burden is off your chest. Now, you can stop thinking of your website until the next time you feel like changing some designs.

I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but your website is never going to be fully done – you still have to maintain it.

Websites are like cars; they need consistent monitoring, updating, and maintenance to perform at their peak. If you leave your website untouched after development, it will become outdated and will stop functioning well. Users will encounter broken links, slow load time, and outdated content.

An outdated website isn’t good for your business. Reports by WebFX show that 88% of online customers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience.

Regular website maintenance keeps your website fresh and up-to-date so you can draw in more traffic, leads and sales. In this post, we’ll cover the basics of website maintenance, give you a breakdown of how much it costs, and show you where you can get the best web maintenance services.

What is website maintenance? 

Website maintenance is the process of making sure your website functions properly and is up to date. It involves 24/7 monitoring of your website, regularly checking your website for security and functionality updates, reviewing software documentation for any conflicts before updating your website, correcting any issues, and making updates to ensure your website runs smoothly.

What does website maintenance include?

As soon as your website is up and running, you need to start web maintenance. Here are some maintenance tasks and how often you should perform them.

Weekly Tasks

After launching your site, you should always perform these tasks weekly:

• Post one or more blog posts to share relevant information about your business to your customers and boost your ranking on Google.
• Check for broken links
• Update your website software and plugins
• Check your website for 404 errors. If there’s any, speak to an expert to fix them.

Monthly Tasks

You should perform these tasks at least once every month:

• Analyze your website statistics to know where traffic is coming from, how your visitors respond to your content, your bounce rate, and what page or post gets the most traffic.
• Test your website loading speed. If it takes more than 3 seconds to load, talk to your web developer.
• Check your local search visibility
• Review your security scans for any issues.
• Back up your website at least once a month, in case something goes wrong with your site. 

Quarterly Tasks

Perform these tasks at least once a quarter to ensure your website functions properly:

• Update your Meta titles and Meta descriptions.
• Update your website photos and graphics.
• Review your website content and update as needed.
• Analyze your website and check if there’s any room for improvement. If there is, speak to your developer. 

Annual Tasks

Perform these tasks every year to make sure your website is up-to-date and working at its optimal level:

• Renew your website’s domain name
• Review each page on your site and watch out for outdated or inaccurate information.
• Test whether your website works correctly in different versions of browsers.
• Test and update forms, pop-ups, and CTAs (Calls to Action).
• Check your marketing campaigns to see if anything needs to be updated or changed
• Analyze your best-performing content and consider repurposing it into another form of content. 
• Consider updating your website design. 

This checklist includes some website maintenance tasks, but this isn’t a comprehensive list of all the tasks you can do on your website. Talk to a professional website maintenance company to recommend a list of tasks to meet your goals.

What happens when you don’t maintain your website after development?

Most people make the mistake of ignoring the website after launching. Don’t do this! While you might be able to save some money at first, you’ll be spending more in the long run when your website starts to give you issues. Here are things that would happen when you don’t maintain your website:

Compromised security

Security is one of the main reasons any business owner should maintain their website. I know you might be thinking, “I run a small business, who would want to hack my website? What would they gain from it?” Every website is prone to attack, no matter the size, location, or type of website.

If you use a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, you should know that this is the most targeted platform for hackers.

Hackers can get in by exploiting the weakness in outdated security patches. If you have so many out-of-date plugins and don’t check up on your site, your website might be the next target.

This is why you should take website maintenance seriously. Always keep your website up-to-date, update plugins, run security and health check-ups regularly, and make sure your security certificates are not expired.

Slow performance

Everyone loves a fast website with a great experience. No one likes to wait a decade for a website to load, or visit a website and find broken links, missing pages, and no valuable information.

Website performance tends to reduce overtime, and without proper maintenance, the theme and template files may not display accurately on mobile devices and web browsers.

For this reason, you must keep up with your website maintenance to make sure it functions at its optimal level.

Lack of Customer Loyalty

Would you go back to a website that doesn’t look good? Straight answer, NO.

If your website doesn’t look appealing and engaging, your visitors will leave and go to your competitors. Your audience needs a reason to stay loyal to your brand.

Website maintenance will keep your website looking good and relevant to visitors and existing customers. When you post great content, readers will be excited to share your post and come back for more.

A good website maintenance routine will give your visitors a reason to trust and recommend you. We recommend you create fresh, engaging, and valuable content regularly. By doing this, your customers will know that you care about them and value their engagement.

Search engines won’t care about your website

Search engines prefer websites that are fast, well maintained, error-free, and with a seamless user experience.

If you don’t maintain your website, search engines will probably ignore your website – and this is bad for your business because no one will find your website organically.

By maintaining your website, you will boost online traffic, increase conversion rate, improve SEO ranking, and generate more leads. We recommend that you update your site regularly and create new content. This would tell the search engines that your website is up, and they should reward you by giving you more traffic. 

Bonus Tip: Install the Google Analytics tool to monitor your traffic and user behavior to identify your top performance pages and pages with high bounce rates. This would help you know what your visitors like and improve on what they don’t like. 

You’d lose money

Your website might experience downtime due to a lack of maintenance. In the online world, any downtime is a loss. You don’t know how many potential customers you lost to your competitors because your website was down. 

When your website is down, you have to get an expert to fix the problem. This would cost you extra expenses and heartache that could have been avoided if you had maintained your website. 

At this ‘downtime’ stage, money is almost the least of your worries, as your reputation is on the line. Once your reputation is smeared, it can take years of rebuilding to get it back. 

Prevention is better than cure. Think about it, why go through all this stress, when you could invest in regular maintenance that costs less than fixing huge problems in the long run.

How much does web maintenance cost per month?

I guess you’re already asking yourself, “How much does website maintenance cost?” Web maintenance costs aren’t fixed, and they are dependent on the type of website you’re running. Here’s a rough estimate of potential maintenance costs for various types of websites:

• Personal websites have low maintenance costs, typical from $5 to $30 per month
• Small business website maintenance costs may range from $30 to $500+ per month
• Ecommerce website maintenance costs may range from $100 to $5000+ per month
• Corporate websites have high maintenance costs, typically from $5000 to $10000+ per month.

Let’s go over the cost factors that we used to arrive at these numbers:

Domain Name Renewal 

Every website has a domain name which is their website’s address. For example, our domain name is glbdesigndevelopment.website. 

You might pay for your domain monthly or annually. It usually costs from $0.08 to $3 per month or $10 to $30 per year.

Let’s go over the cost factors that we used to arrive at these numbers:

Website Hosting

Different websites have different hosting needs. A personal website wouldn’t have the same hosting needs as a corporate website. Here’s a rough overview of how much hosting would cost for different types of websites:

• Hosting a small to medium-sized blog would cost around $2 to $20 per month
• Hosting a medium to large-sized blog would cost around $25 to $100 per month
• A small to medium-sized eCommerce website would cost about $25 to $100 per month
• A medium to large-sized eCommerce website would cost about $100 to $500 per month.

Content 

Publishing regular content will help you gain new readers and position you as an expert in your industry. It is also great for website maintenance as it shows your visitors and search engines that you are active.

Creating great content doesn’t have to cost much if you write it yourself. But, to get the best value out of your content, it’s better to outsource it. It costs about $100- $3000 per month to get great content that would engage your audience and grow your website.

Tracking and Analytics 

Tracking your website’s traffic will help you understand what your audience wants and what you should focus on in the future. 

You can track your visitors for free with Google Analytics. There are also paid analytics tools that offer more tracking features. For the paid tools, you should budget around $50 to $300 per month.

Security

• Security maintenance includes:
• Automatic backups
• Spam prevention
• Uptime monitoring
• Screening for malware injections
• SSL certificate
• Recovering from hacks, etc.

Security maintenance can cost anywhere from $50 to $200 per year.

Design Updates

No, we don’t mean redesigning your website. When we say design updates, we mean design works like eBook design, sales banner, infographics, product images, featured images for blog posts. 

If you’re just starting, you can do most of your design yourself. But as you grow and expand, it’s best to outsource your design needs to a professional designer. You can expect to pay from $100 to $2000 for good designs.

Tech Support

For tech support, it’s better to hire an expert who understands how code works. However, if you are good at codes, you can handle this yourself. You should budget around $100 to $1000 per month for technical maintenance. 

Professional web maintenance services

Maintaining your website keeps your site secure, improves your reputation, and helps you gain more traffic and leads. Maintaining your website on your own can be frustrating and time-consuming. You might also not have time to hire freelancers or the money to train an in-house team to do it for you. 

So what option do you have? Work with a website maintenance company.

Working with a professional website maintenance company like GLB Design & Development can help you make sure your website functions at an optimal level without having to break the bank.

We are dedicated to helping you maintain your website even if you just launched your site or you’ve had one for some time now. Contact us today, and let’s make your website the best it’s ever been.