Websites are the lifeblood of any business operating online. But, as with any facet of a business, your website can only provide benefit if it’s maintained. This guide will take you through some of the key reasons why it is important to consistently maintain your website platform, theme and plugins.
Maintain Positive Customer Experience
It’s a universal truth that positive customer experience leads to positive outcomes for business. Many potential customers will have their initial interaction with a company via their website. Therefore, it’s important your website offers a positive user experience by providing relevant and timely information, alongside an easy to navigate layout.
So how does this need to be maintained? One consideration is making sure all buttons, pages and menus are working correctly. This is where updating plugins is especially important, as plug-ins can add extra functionality on a website or add new features. If not updated on a regular basis this can lead to broken elements on a page and negative website experiences. Making sure the pages load correctly on various devices and the load speed is consistently high is also important. A slow load speed or poor navigation on devices such as mobile can have negative impacts on site performance and should be resolved immediately.
Ensure Site Security
With the increased dependency of the internet over the last couple of years, cyber crime has become increasingly prevalent. In fact last year the Australia Cyber Security Center (ACSC) reported that during the 2020-21 financial year they received over 67,500 cybercrime reports, an increase of nearly 13 per cent from the previous financial year. Unfortunately, businesses are also one of the most valued targets for cyber criminals as they leverage information and data extracted from companies to sometimes cause irreparable damage to their online image.
One way to help ensure that your business remains safe is through consistent review of your website’s security. This means removing any vulnerabilities and updating outdated plug-ins that can be leveraged as a point of access. It is also important that your website is being hosted by a reputable hosting company and an effective system is in place around distribution of sensitive website information (ex. website passwords). We recommended chatting to a reliable site security company to help ensure there are no areas that have been overlooked in your websites’ setup.
Continue Strong SEO Performance
Search Engine Optimisation or SEO focuses on ensuring that a website appears high in the organic search engine rankings. There are a few different ways that this is achieved with a main area being content. Users want to find relevant content quickly and search engines value businesses that can provide timely content to match high demand. It’s therefore beneficial to keep content up to date, removing outdated content from the website. Companies can also look to prune or update old content as a way to drive strong SEO performance and content should be regularly reviewed during website maintenance checks.
Maintaining Site Performance
When maintaining your website one key focus is ensuring your platform (WordPress, Shopify) and plugins are updated. We recommend updates are completed monthly or quarterly. Theme updates should also be a priority, and theme versions should be checked regularly for new releases and updated. These updates contain important bug fixes, security updates and new plugin features you can take advantage of. If neglected, not only can your website not function properly it can also leave your business more vulnerable to attack.
To schedule your website maintenance to ensure high quality performance and best possible customer experience, chat to the team at Redline Digital today.