Long gone are days when creating a website was just a matter of development and deploying it on a server. All you had to do was pay thousands of dollars to get your website built and wait for the leads – No extra attention and maintenance was required. However, things are pretty different as post-development maintenance is equally essential as the development cycle.
This is mainly due to the skyrocketing competition of the online market and bombardment of small business websites. Today, you need to stand out among the tough competition to make your brand and business site successful. Moreover, websites today are prone to cyber-attacks and hackings than before; therefore, staying on top of your website maintenance game is a must.
What is A Website Maintenance Plan?
As simple as it sounds, the word website maintenance plan refers to the plan or strategy which includes all the information and details related to the website maintenance service. Although it may sound quite simple initially, whether it is a WordPress maintenance plan or any other website, it requires extensive knowledge and works to create a maintenance plan successfully.
Now let’s talk about five critical reasons why you need a website maintenance plan.
5 Reasons Why You Need A Website Maintenance Plan
1. Latest Security Updates
Security is one of the primary reasons you need to stay on top of your Website maintenance plan. Hundreds of WordPress sites are taken down by Google every week due to malware attacks. Security updates are an essential part of a website maintenance plan that ensures that your business site is constantly updated with the latest security protocols.
2. Thorough Testing
Ensuring that each process of your site works seamlessly is quite essential. The main reason behind this is if your site functions like payment gateways, contact forms, and CTA buttons, etc., don’t work like they’re supposed to, your website would face a hit in terms of traffic and bounce-off rates. But, that’s not all; your sales and revenue would be affected as well.
A website maintenance plan includes regular reviews and testing of your site’s functionalities and interactive buttons to ensure its smooth and seamless working.
3. Optimization
Optimization is an essential aspect of today’s throat-cutting competition. No matter if you have world-class design and top-notch content on your website, if it’s not optimized as per the SEO standards, your position in the Google SERPs would gradually decline, and you’d notice a decline in leads as well. It’s that simple; if you’re not visible to your prospects, you’re not going to make any sales. Therefore, SEO is an important part of a website maintenance plan to ensure that your site is continuously optimized as Google’s suggested criteria and is always visible to your target audience.
4. Site Backups
Having a backup of your business site is most important. This is because even a minor bug may cause your website to crash. Worst of all, a website is always at risk of losing data. In that cases, if you don’t site backups, you won’t be able to retrieve your data, and your website would be gone for good. Therefore, regular site backups are included in the website maintenance plan to ensure that you don’t face such disasters.
5. Performance Optimization
Website performance plays a vital role in making a website successful since it is an essential part of its UX. For example, the idea loading speed of a website is 3-5 seconds. If your website takes more than that to load, your audience will start looking for better alternatives, and you’ll see a spike in bounce-off rates. Therefore, website maintenance plans include speed optimization to ensure the robust performance of your website.
Conclusion
While there are multiple reasons why you need to consider a website maintenance plan, these were five essential ones that you must know. Also, it is worth remembering that you must stay on top of your website maintenance game, or your competition would leave you down in the dust.
