Okay, let's face it. Having an online presence now-days is mandatory. From small blogs to news sites or e-shops, being online is vital for your business. This presence of yours (your website), you need to always take care of it and maintain it, even when you no longer feel the same thrill. After all, if you are running a business, your site is the first thing that your clients see. It can definitely make or break a company, as scary as it may be.

Your website needs to always look good and move well, just like physical stores change their shop windows regularly to attract buyers. Basically, it is the same concept but on a virtual level. You should definitely know that keeping your site maintained is extremely important, which is why you should always do small tweaks to it to make sure that everything is in order and all seems fresh. They don’t always cost a lot of money and time if you know exactly what to do. However, we should first talk about some of the reasons why the maintenance of your site is crucial. Here we go!

It makes a good first impression

Everyone who visits your website can be a possible client or collaborator, and they definitely need to be impressed as soon as they open it in order for this to happen. So, make sure that it is up to date, looks polished and neat, and most importantly, moves well and feels fresh.

It makes people want to come back

Let’s put it this way. When someone visits your site and they notice that it’s up to date and regularly updated, they will certainly have a reason to return. Otherwise, this won’t happen and your business might end up suffering. New content means new visitors and returning ones, as well as an improvement in your search engine rankings. Your site will be pushed up if search engines, such as Google, notice that you are regularly updating it. A win-win situation!

Helps with security

Let’s say that you have a business that you want to improve, but your website is not the most updated nor pleasant looking. Ok, the latter might not be that important, but failing to regularly update your site can lead to serious security breaches. Security updates and software patches are crucial and you should never run your site without having them up to date. Unless you want hackers to start stealing important data, which you probably don’t. Our website maintenance plan can help you with this.

How to keep your site maintained?

Well, this is probably the question on every site owner’s lips after reading the aforementioned reasons why site maintenance is so important. If this is the case then you will be happy to hear that doing this is not that difficult nor time-consuming. With just a few simple tricks you can transform your site into a wonderland for potential clients or partners. Just keep reading!

1. Update, update, and update some more!

Yes, we’ve mentioned this before, but fresh content is the best thing that you can add to your website if you want to maintain it interesting. And apart from updating your site with new and interesting content, there are also security, theme and plugin updates that keep your business safe from any possible outside dangers. So, the first rule of keeping your site maintained is to first keep it up to date from all perspectives. Usually, this needs to be done once a month. Never omit that and you should have a booming business!

2. Moderate the comments on your site!

If you’ve had your website for some years then you probably know all that struggle of moderating comments. Yes, it’s annoying, but this step is also very important in keeping your site maintained. So, make sure that you make time to delete spam and inappropriate comments and to accept pending ones at least once a month. These spam robots may be annoying, but you probably don’t want to turn off comments on your site because of them. After all, this is the easiest way to allow your visitors to share their opinion. Don’t take that away from them because you might even drive them away.

3. Keep your site user-friendly!

And by this, we mean making your website as comfortable, pleasant, and easy-to-navigate as possible. Apart from deleting old themes and putting new ones up, there are some other tricks that you can apply in order for this to happen. For example:

• Maintenance for your links: this means that you should regularly check the links on your site and fix them if they’re broken or replace them. The worst thing that can happen to a visitor is to click on a link that leads them to a non-existent page. They will immediately leave your site and never come back;
• Make your site accessible on mobile devices: in today’s world where most people navigate the web on their smartphones, it would be a good idea to make sure that your site runs smoothly on various mobile devices. This will add you some points in their notebook and will make them want to return soon because they’ll know that your site is easily accessible from a smartphone or tablet;

Conclusion

In conclusion, there are a lot of Content Management Systems (CMS), like WordPress, that can make the job of maintaining your website a lot easier. However, this doesn’t mean that you should not do regular check-ups of it, including content updates. You should also become aware of the great importance of maintaining your site, both for yourself and for your business (if you’re running one). So, just by following a few easy steps you can end up with an up-to-date website that runs smoothly, is user-friendly, and has relevant and fresh content. Our website peace of mind plans can help you achieve that. Have a look!