Importance of Website Support and Maintainance

To create a custom website for your company you hire a website development and designing agency. You trust their expertise to help you in planning, designing, strategy, creation, development, testing, approvals, tweaks and final deliverables. But, is all work done once a website is created? What is the solution if your site has been hacked, destroyed, deleted or created a new page and ends up messing other pages in the process?

The proper functioning of your website plays a big role in your business success. Therefore regular support and maintenance of the website is an important concern and task. The maintenance task includes maintaining database, regular back-ups, plugin updates, version upgrades, clear unused plugins, cleaning spam comment and unpublished draft post and much more. That is why you need a trusted, reliable partner to take care of your website support and maintenance task.

REASONS WHY YOU MUST HAVE A RELIABLE, PROFESSIONAL TEAM TO TAKE CARE OF YOUR WEBSITE:

1. HAVING TECHNICAL EXPERTISE ON HAND

If your website faces a problem, you know you have experts to mitigate the issue. The longer it is delayed, the greater is the chance for destruction. Which can cause your website to go down or not function properly as a result of many issues like an unintentional error made by your staff, hosting issue or even a hacker. Website maintenance experts can resolve many of such future problems.

• SECURITY:
  If your website is not updated timely, it becomes more prone to be hacked. You may even think that your company does not hold much significance to attract hackers’ attention. Unfortunately, this is not true, hackers do not discriminate. To combat known threats, WordPress releases regular updates, and, so do plugin developers. So if you observe a red circle with a number next to Updates in your WordPress Dashboard, you should not ignore it. However, it’s best to have your website manager complete and monitor the updates as sometimes they can interfere with other website functionality features if not done properly, at the right time, or tested accordingly.
• COMPATIBILITY, FUNCTIONALITY, PERFORMANCE:
  All updates may not be addressing to security issue but they are significant enough and important for better performance and functionality of your website. Once a major WordPress update happens, your site files and plug-ins needs to be updated and also it is important to run scheduled back-ups of your site files to make sure that everything still looks and functions as it should. On the other hand you should make sure there are no inactive plugins or inactive themes that you are not using. If there are, it should be deleted from the directory. If you are not doing such regular maintenance, it can slow down your website performance and will give an opportunity to hackers to get in through. Therefore to maintain good speed and performance of your website, you should always maintain and secure it properly. The poor and slow performance of your website can also cause your visitors to leave and go to a competitor’s site and also affects your page rank with the search engine.
• WEBSITE HOSTING:
  While web hosting may seem insignificant to you for you web needs , it plays an important role and ensures that your website is up and running smoothly for your customers.Web server quality and capabilities have a direct impact on your website. It affects page speed, vulnerability exposure, security and much more. Moreover if your company holds a big name you are probably on a server with thousands which increases your website risk for attack by hackers. You’re also sharing bandwidth and storage resources with other websites which can negatively affect the performance of your site. It’s essential to do hosting through a server whom you trust. Managed WordPress hosting ensures that your site will perform at it’s very best.

2. USER EXPERIENCE

Relevant design, content, and mobile updates are also important to drive visitors to your site. Once they visit your site, you should make sure they have a great experience so they keep returning or refer other customers. While WordPress gives you the freedom to manage the content of your website on your own, it doesn’t give you the ability to easily make changes in your website design. You require design and programming expertise to keep the look of your website fresh and attractive.

3. SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a multi-step, continuous process that helps keeping a good rank of your website in search engine and increase your website’s visibility. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) promotes your website on social media, online business directories, and search engines. Properly implemented SEO and SEM strategy will improve ranking of your website on search engine and drives targeted visitors to your website. You may have the best product for best value, but if you’re not found online, you are not selling it.

Having a fast-loading site with fresh content not only keeps your visitors interested on your site, it also helps with your site’s search engine ranking—where your site appears in search engine results pages. If your website appears higher in search results, then it gives you a greater advantage over your competitors. That could mean more conversion, donations, memberships, or clients.

4. FINANCIAL SAVINGS

You may feel that you might save money if you and your staff maintain the site yourselves. Then here you must open your eyes and see that it costs more to fix it if an issue arises than it does to maintain it properly. Regular maintenance of your website helps keep your WordPress running properly.

Furthermore, major issues creates higher maintenance costs. A reliable maintenance partner provides you with a monthly care plan. On the other hand if something breaks, agencies charge you an hourly rate to fix it, if your site is not on a monthly plan, which can exceed the cost of a monthly care plan.

5. TIME

An expert and professional help will definitely help you save time and avoid major and minor issues which you may not be able to handle all by yourself. Time is money and doing your own website maintenance and support will just keep you away from doing more important tasks.

Biggest takeaway? Don’t allow your investment to go to waste! It’s not always a good idea to choose to rely on yourself, an assistant or a friend for website support and maintenance. A reliable, professional team can be extremely beneficial for your website support and maintenance because they will be with you for the lifetime of your company, growing with you each and every month.