Marketing your website and trying to make sales while
gaining audience members is not all there is to owning and operating a website.
You also have to do all the website maintenance. Website management is like many
other maintenance duties. It gets overlooked until something goes wrong or when
an owner wonders why no one visits it.
The same effort and mentality of owning a physical location needs to be
involved in an online presence. Then the webmaster is wishing they were more on
top of the ball with their maintenance tasks.
What is involved in
Website Maintenance?
Website maintenance service includes things like domain
re-registration, backing up files, scanning for security breaches, monitoring
spam comments, managing contacts and questions, changing information and
photos, updating plugins and software, as well as creating high quality content
for your readers.
This may seem like something that is integrated into your
normal activities for your website but the stats don’t lie. Most people brush
these tasks under the carpet and then bad things can happen. One common example
even for tech savvy web masters is when they need to update their CMS version
and do not back up their files.
Before you know it you have hit the ‘Automatic Update’
button and their site crashes because it is not compatible with the new version
of the CMS. The last time you did a backup was last month and you lose a ton of
good content. This is all too common and only a tiny mishap compared to what
could go wrong if you don’t keep up with basic website management.
What Happens When Website
Maintenance Doesn't get done?
When website maintenance tasks go undone you are putting it
all at risk. You need to provide a good user experience with relevant and
rewarding information to your website visitors.
Continual updates, great design, ease of use, and other areas should not
be overlooked.
If you do not maintain your site properly your main source
of income can be quickly lost. When a website has substantial down time or
lacks quality it gets affected in several ways. First people cannot interact
with it so you will lose out on sales and potential customers. The relations
between new and existing customers will become negative as will your
relationship with search engines like Google.
Website down time is the most obvious reason to lose
rankings because if a website is offline the user will have a poor experience.
If your site is ranking in the top five for a keyword and a user clicks on your
link only to find a down site, that is considered a bad experience. Google does
not want their customers (internet users) to have bad experiences. All the
sites Google refers people to they want to be the best. If this happens enough you will lose rank, thus you will
lose traffic and this could impact your sales not only for the time your site
is down but for the future as well.
What Can You Do to
Make Life Easier?
One thing some professionals do is outsource their website
management tasks to an outside agency. This might seem over kill but it is a
small fee compared to the amount of time you spend doing these duties. If
something goes wrong you would be willing to pay triple to go back in time and
have that security.
An outside agency will make sure you do not have any tasks
swept under the rug. Your backups will be taken care of every time you schedule
them. When you allow an outside agency to take over your management duties you
will have peace of mind that things will go smoothly. If things do go wrong you
will also have support from a qualified team to guide you through the process
of getting back to where you need to be.
Basic website management is all about taking care of your
website. You need to make sure your site is getting backed up, versions are
being updated and security is being held in check and that your website is a
breadth of knowledge on your offerings and looks active. If you are not
absolutely sure you can keep up with the duties you should consider hiring an
outside agency to give you peace of mind.
Think of what downtime will mean to your website and your
business. If your site does go down or you have a security risk it could damage
your reputation and your ability to earn an income. E-commerce sites are
especially at risk since they rely on the web to directly generate their
income. The cost to hire an agency will be far less than having to start your
website over again from scratch.
This really help full for beginners like me...Thanks Brad!
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