Website Care for Small Businesses.
Websites and apps make our lives so much easier. At the click of a button you can have anything. Access to any good or service you can imagine, the option to instantly transfer money from one account to another, share and upload sensitive information safely and securely, the applications are limitless. What many don't know, is that behind every great website or app is a team of experts that ensures everything is functioning as it should be.
Website maintenance is an investment in security and peace of mind. Without it, you'll end up missing out on the latest updates, and your site will generally become slow and vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Ultimately, you’ll rank low in the SERPs, meaning your competitors will stay ahead of you, and you’ll miss out on the very customers you intended to acquire through your site. In fact, due to lack of maintenance, out of the 64% of small and medium-sized enterprises with a website, 21% receive low traffic, and 43% complain of unresponsiveness and slow speeds. A half a second in slower load speeds for example can translate to massive losses in revenue.
In this blog, we’ll look at website maintenance, its benefits, and what should be included in it, and how you can choose the right website maintenance company.
Website maintenance involves checking your website to see if it’s healthy and performing well. It’s about keeping up with the latest trends, security updates, fresh content, improving customer experience, and encouraging traffic growth.
From time to time, you should have your website assessed for issues and security compliance. This should not be a once or twice a year thing. Instead, do regular monitoring to ensure your business is always up and running all the time.
What are the benefits of website maintenance?
Here are the top reasons why you need website care:
- Up-to-date websites help grow your sales: Your website plays a vital role in guiding consumers towards making a purchase. If your site is slow or doesn’t work well, there's a high chance your customer will get sick of waiting for your pages to load and move onto one of your competitors.
- Improves security: Keeping your website well maintained helps protect you and your customers from security breaches. Website care ensures you're protected from potential viruses or cyber attacks from hackers that may be interested in stealing sensitive information.
- Website uptime: Website maintenance helps avoid downtime. Downtime is when your website goes offline temporarily which is a fairly normal occurrence. A few minutes a month here or there is to be expected however hours at a time can mean big losses in revenue and damaging your brand reputation. Website care packages come with uptime monitoring which means there's automated software monitoring if your website goes down at any given time. The right company handling your website care will instantly detect if your website goes down at any given point in time and quickly get you back online as if it never happened.
- Quick restore: Website maintenance ensures your website services are restored fastest possible in case of service downtime. This is usually achieved through a backup to your most recently saved version of your website.
- Supports your SEO strategy: Persistent security and technical issues, as well as outdated website content, structure, or design, increases your website’s bounce rate. A high bounce rate means a customer lands on your website and quickly clicks off due to a poor user experience. Website maintenance helps avoid these issues by keeping your content, website structure, and security measures up-to-date, keeping your bounce rates low.
Choosing the right company to care for your website
The following tips make it easy to choose the right to manage the health of your website:
1. Choose locally hosted companies.
For the sake of your website’s loading speeds and time, it’s advisable to choose a locally hosted company. What’s more, locally hosted agencies provide you with better security. They have a reputation to uphold so they will generally come with better customer service. A locally hosted company also means you wont have to deal with
2. Determine the services offered each company
Find a partner that provides you with all the services needed to support your business’s website. For instance, you can look for a company that offers some or all of the following services:
- Editing images
- Adding images
- Back up services
- Plugin Updates
- Theme Updates
- Website monitoring
- Analytics
- Monthly reporting
- Database cleaning
- Test website speed
- Checking for broken links
- Coaching Calls
- Advice
- Competitor Analysis
- SEO Optimisation
3. Choose a reputable company
Before choosing a website maintenance company, search for reviews and testimonials about the company on Google and the company’s website. Does the company have clients to vouch for their services? Check what clients have to say and how the company responds to positive and negative feedback online to get an idea of its customer service.
4. Consider the experience
Finally, go for a website care company that has an experienced team to make relevant improvements to your website performance. Testimonials and reviews are among the best places to see the experience of a company.
Invest in the help of professionals
Maintaining and updating your website regularly is the foundation for your business’s success and a task that is best performed by a professional. In addition to saving you time, the right website maintenance experts keep your site secure, fast, and updated, increasing your traffic and, ultimately, your sales high. Most importantly, it provides you with peace of mind.
If you’re looking for an agency to care for your businesses website, look no further than
DSIGNS. For years, we’ve provided our customers with website care and maintenance, including uptime monitoring, security updates, backup services. Get in touch with us today, to get started with a custom package that suits your specific needs!
