If you look at beginners or those who own small businesses today, you will realize that they are having difficulty running their websites properly. Is maintaining a website that difficult? Well, it was a few decades ago but with the recent technological advancements, website maintenance has become easy and time-saving. You also cannot blame beginners when it comes to these technical things. After all, they open their company to sell goods, not to maintain websites.
However, it is also important to note that your company will go nowhere without making a business website. You will simply not be able to fulfill your marketing objectives without having a business website in your plans. In the twenty-first century, every company is associated with a fully-functional website. Website marketing is crucial to the success of almost every company in the world. Gone are the days when you just have to rely on some physical store to get your sales going.
What is Website Maintenance?
If you want to achieve long-term goals for your online business, you must know what is website maintenance. It is defined as the number of tasks required to make your website work properly and without any problems. If your website is not up to date with the recent technological advancements, it means that you should maintain your website. This process involves the regular checking of your website for issues, resolving those issues, and upgrading your website.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
If your website is maintained properly, it is likely that you will not have any problems opening it up. If your website is taking too long to open, you don’t have a high Google pagespeed insight score. If you look at all the websites established on Strikingly, they all have a pagespeed insight score of more than 90. The reason behind that high score is that the website is maintained properly. The web developers continuously look into the website's issues (if necessary).
Importance of Website Maintenance
1. Customers Prefer Online Research
Even if you have a professional website and have gained the trust of almost every customer in your area, it still may not prove to be enough. According to research, it is stated that around 87% of the people conduct online research before deciding to purchase a product online. When you implement a web maintenance plan, you must understand that your website can also be part of their online research. If you do not fulfill their expectations, it will do no favors to your credibility.
Impressions are crucial for a business website. Website maintenance ensures positive reviews from customers. If your website leaves negative feedback on your website, they will start looking into your competitor’s website instead. You will not just miss out on online sales, but you will also fail to attract large audiences afterward.
2. First Impression Counts
As we have spoken about impressions in the previous point, the first impression is where the fate of your online business is decided. If you have an effective website maintenance plan, the first impression of your website will likely be good in the eyes of many customers. If the content on your website is outdated or doesn’t match their interests, you are likely to see a decline in your conversion rate.
As part of your maintenance plan, you can choose to improve your call to action (CTA) button. If you don’t have a CTA button on your website, make sure that you don’t hesitate to include that on your website. This is where the customers will be directed on what to do after landing on your website. It is also important to include relevant and catchy text on your CTA button. For example, you won’t be attracting any customers by having a text of “Download” on your CTA button.
3. SEO Strategy
For any website globally, search engine optimization (SEO) strategies are extremely important. If you are a beginner, likely, you wouldn't know about SEO strategies. SEO strategies are those strategies that ensure your website gets a high Google ranking. If your website doesn’t get recognized by Google, your website content isn’t up to date, or the tools you have used on your website are simply old school. This happens when you don’t have an appropriate web maintenance plan.
Image taken from Google
Even though it is a good strategy to use the old content and update it, certain things cannot be upgraded. If you include old strategies to achieve your website maintenance goals, you will simply go nowhere. Most importantly, you should understand that the maintenance of your website strongly influences your SEO rankings. If your SEO rankings aren’t great, you don’t have a plan related to the maintenance of your website. Strikingly fully believes that if you want to achieve long-term objectives for your business, you must implement SEO strategies.
Tips to Maintain Your Website
1. Create Content
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
Website content is anything that you display on your website that can be viewed by your target audience. In today’s day and age, blogs are extremely important for the success of a website. If you simply have a blog website, you can choose to write content about anything that you like. It is also important to note that website content is a major part of your website maintenance plan. To attain high Google rankings, you must ensure that your website content is upgraded and relevant to your niche idea.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
For example, you cannot be talking about a food website and have a website related to artificial intelligence (AI). Similarly, you should always be writing blogs about trending topics on social media. If you talk about the Manchester bombings of 2017 today, it won’t bring as much traffic as it would have done five years ago. If you talk about the situation in Ukraine today, it will definitely bring a lot of attention to your blogging section. Strikingly helps you to create a blog website within a couple of clicks.
2. Consider Help
It is never a bad strategy to consider help as part of your website maintenance plan. Whether you are a beginner or an experienced professional, you are not going to know about everything related to digital marketing. For example, if you are an SEO expert but don’t have experience in SEO writing, you can hire a writer who can help you deliver content efficiently.
Outsourcing is something that makes the business grow to extra heights. If you outsource your tasks to the right people, you can maintain the growth of your business and your website. However, the people you choose to hire must be trustworthy. For example, if you have just hired somebody, you shouldn’t be giving access to all the things found on your website. There is a risk that they might capture all the critical data on your website before running away.
3. Look at Your Traffic.
Your website maintenance plan will have a significant influence on your website traffic. When your visitors move in and out of your website, they provide you with influential data. As a website owner, you must be collecting those marketing analytics, or your productivity levels will go down. When you maintain your website, you must look into the following aspects
- Bounce rate
- Conversion rate
- Google pagespeed insight score
4. Make Required Changes
Adaptability is a quality that ensures your business is unique compared to the rest of the competitors. Where most of your competitors fall, your adaptability will ensure that your business remains strong regardless of the circumstances. You must use the best work schedule apps to make sure that you have the required time to do data analysis of your website.
As part of your website maintenance plan, it is never wrong to make changes within your website all the time. However, there is a saying, “you shouldn’t change what is not broken”. You should only be making the required changes. Making an overdose of changes will only make things worse for your schedule.
Conclusion
In today’s day and age, maintaining a website is extremely important. You cannot expect to see an increase in your online sales if you are just relying on a physical store. A physical store may attract a few people in your colony, but it won’t have any scope in the international market. Therefore, it is not just about creating a website. It is also about having a website maintenance strategy to ensure that you continue to succeed in the long term.
Image taken from Strikingly
If you want to create a fully-functional website today, you shouldn’t need any second invitations from Strikingly. Strikingly is a free website builder that enables you to create a website without the cost and within just a couple of clicks. You need to customize one of the website templates we have provided, and your desired website will be in front of your computer screen. So, create a website today and maintain it properly to make your mark in the digital world.
