Do you remember when you bought your new shiny car? It might look great for a while, but you need to maintain it constantly to ensure that it is in perfect running order. Just like your car, you also require website maintenance for your respective platform. Once you create a website, you must do all you can to ensure its protection. You can look for security updates, or improve your website traffic for that matter.
Before we get into the importance, you all may wonder what is website maintenance? Let’s move back to the car example. Do you know how to check the areas for improvement regarding your car (leaks or damages)? If you do, you have your answer because the maintenance of a website is a procedure of verifying the smooth running of your respective website.
At the end of the day, it is all about keeping Google happy. Whether you check for security updates, website evaluations, or improvement in traffic growth, you must make sure that your website is searchable. The maintenance of a website is crucial to generating new audiences and keeping your current customers.
Importance of Maintaining your Website
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If a soul is incomplete without your eyes, your business is incomplete without its website. When customers or different search engines look at your website, they want some indications from you to assure them that you run a professional business. A professional business has an effective website maintenance plan, which gives it the deserved value.
With an effective maintenance strategy, you will be able to attract new customers and retain the current ones. Moreover, you will have good search engine rankings. Let’s look into some of the reasons why maintaining a website is important for the welfare of your business.
∙ Business Reputation
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Customers are always looking for trustworthy businesses. If some customers have the experience of getting deceived by a particular business, they will look at your business even more closely. If you create a web page for your business that doesn’t look attractive to the customers, they will run away from it straight away.
For example, if customers land on a website that has broken links, outdated content, and slow loading speed, it will create a poor impression within them. Not only will they not appear on this website, but they will also refrain from all those services or products that are associated with that website builder. This is where a bad reputation causes problems in more ways than one.
Therefore, you must know the website maintenance strategies before you create a website. You must redirect your old pages, publish necessary content and improve your website’s speed to attract your customers. Bringing valid traffic is crucial to the welfare of your website and the overall business. Therefore, make sure that you have done all the right things to ensure that.
∙ Cost Savings
It is always good not to invest excessively on a website and look for cost-effective methods to improve your web maintenance. However, this doesn’t mean that you should compensate for the quality of your website. If you ignore your website’s health for a long time, it will bring issues and problems to your business. Inappropriate website maintenance will result in loss of traffic and a potential loss of business.
If there are multiple things for you to deal with, you may end up spending thousands of dollars to rectify them. You must have a website to support your business. There is no point prioritizing just the business side and not paying any attention to the website. Therefore, it is a good idea to invest in maintenance services and maintain your website's health.
∙ Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
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Customers do not just visit your website, they crawl many other aspects of your platform. They can either promote your business or bury it into the ground. But why is search engine optimization an important aspect of a website maintenance strategy?
The search engines prefer websites that are responsive, error-free, and containing effective content. When you are maintaining a website, you are letting Google know about your website updates and the new content that you publish on it. These factors play a crucial role in your website ranking. You must verify that your website contains all the necessary content that enables your customers to make their minds up about your product.
∙ New Features
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Website technology has evolved over the years. In recent times, we have seen the importance of having features that can coincide with your social media platforms and generate traffic from there. Bringing traffic from social media platforms has an enormous influence on the success of your website. If you cannot integrate social media onto your website, there will soon come a time when your website becomes unknown to the worldwide audience.
Online security is another thing that is crucial to a website maintenance plan. You must invest in your website security by checking out the importance of having an SSL certificate. This strategy will ensure the incoming customers that their details are secure and cannot come into the hands of potential hackers.
Apart from that, you can also work together with your team to improve the maintenance of your website. Strikingly gives you an opportunity to interact with your team members and maintain your website through Strikingly Collaboration Feature. You can invite 10 team members to your multiple accounts. If you want to know how to use this feature, simply go through the steps below:
- Go to the Strikingly Site’s Editor and go to settings.
- On the left column, head over to the ‘Team’ section
- Attach a photo to your respective profile
- Go to ‘Add Teammate’ from the drop-down
- Search your teammate
- Add your teammate’s email ID
- Give the responsibilities to your teammate that works best for your website or the overall company. If your teammate has multiple roles, give them the privileges that they want.
- Send an invitation to your teammate from the drop-down section
- If your teammates want access to your website, they must accept your invitations
∙ Improved Customer Experience
If you want to ensure effective website maintenance, imagine yourself as the website visitor. Look for the things that a random visitor may acquire on your website. Imagine that you are a customer and you suddenly land on a particular website. On that website, you may see no steps being taken when it comes to maintaining a website. You will see a high loading time, spam after every 5 seconds, and broken links. This will increase frustration within you and there won’t be long before you leave the website.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
Now, imagine that you have landed on a website that has undergone professional web maintenance. You look at a creative web design, see relative content on the blog section, and experience no problems with loading. You will be satisfied and want to come to the website more often.
Nowadays, almost 90% of business owners work in correspondence to the customers’ perspectives. This statistic differs completely from what it was in 2010, where only 36% of the customers’ perspectives got any attention. It goes to show that if you have a good website maintenance plan, you can generate traffic on your platform from around the world. Moreover, you will not just make your customers happy, you will also generate revenue. The customers will run to make an inquiry about your product or service as they would be overwhelmed by your content. Soon, there will come a time when your customers will become promoters. They will share your platform on their social media accounts and tell their friends and family members about it. If your website gets promoted at no cost, it doesn’t get any better than that.
Conclusion
Trying to have a website maintenance plan is like having a plan to fix your car. Sure, you can play a part in some of its fixings, but other aspects are handed over to the professionals to ensure that they get it done. Similarly, the success of your website and your business evaluation totally depend upon your website being a superb source of information. When you decide to publish your website, you would require an appropriate server and domain hosting for the completion of this procedure.
Many offline website builders do not provide this facility. You must use and integrate these services via third-party vendors. If you understand domain registration and server hosting, this will be a walk in the park for you. Beginners may find it difficult to conduct the additional steps in creating a website. Strikingly is a well-established platform that takes care of all these things for you, especially if you are a beginner. We create a combination of domain registration and server hosting and convert it into one exquisite package. After you are done with the editing of your profile, you can simply click on publish, and your website will be made live. Later on, you can add the custom domain or the free URL. If you are still confused, you can interact with our Happiness Officers in the live chatbox.
