Often undervalued, but an extremely pivotal part of running any website is the website maintenance and security upkeep of that site.
Maintaining your website is a small investment that can yield significant benefits in a wide variety of areas for your business and online presence.
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The reality is that once your website has launched, the work is not complete. Without proper website maintenance and security, you’re at risk of compromising and losing out on many of the benefits your site brings to your business and brand.
WordPress updates often introduce new features and functionality, such as improved user interfaces, customisation options, and SEO tools. Updating your site can improve the user experience and help you stay ahead of the competition.
Content and user experience
Maintaining your content and providing a good user experience is as important as any part of your website; it’s the whole reason the website exists in the first place, right?
Providing freshly updated and targeted content will give your users a reason to come back to your site and be reflected positively in your SEO score. If your content strategy is well thought out and targets your users, it will give you a greater chance of scoring highly on Google.
This also allows you to review your internal and external links throughout your site. This can be done manually or via a plugin. The internal and external links throughout your content are an essential part of your SEO strategy and shouldn’t be overlooked, especially when you’re in the process of updating content.
Pairing your content and user experience maintenance updates with a platform like Google Analytics and Google Search Console gives you a powerful opportunity to, metaphorically speaking, have a back-and-forth conversation with your users, making minor tweaks to optimise your website to function beneficially to everyone involved, based on the feedback you have been provided.
Keeping these updates small and regular allow you to build a powerful website over time that is made with the user at the forefront of all the changes.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Staying relevant to Google’s search rankings isn’t an easy task at the best of times. It involves many different factors, some of which are visual such as content, and some which are quite technical and generally require developers.
Some of the main factors that are involved in ranking high on Google include:
- Page content /quality and relevance
- Website security
- Page speed /performance
- Accessibility
- Internal/external linking
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Regular maintenance is key to staying on top of the SEO pillars, as these can all be big tasks if ignored and only tackled when there are issues.
This also includes things like Google Search Console, which is key to analytics. Defining short-and long-term analytics goals before you start maintenance helps you optimise your website based on your user goals.
Consistent maintenance allows you to be efficient with your website updates. It makes the job simpler and more effective as you can optimise your website towards the analytics and conversion goals you have set for your website.
Website security
Website security is one of the most pivotal parts of web maintenance and is the costliest to fix (both time and money) if overlooked.
Inevitably over time, the technology your website is built on becomes dated, and people find ways to exploit flaws in the system. Luckily there is a vast community of developers working on this technology who are constantly updating this as new flaws and methodologies are discovered, allowing the ecosystem to stay safe and thrive.
Keeping up with these updates is extremely important, however, and not doing so could leave your website vulnerable to bad actors, compromising your client’s data and your ability to do business online.
Google will also refuse to give any priority to websites that expose consumers to high levels of risks, so not only does maintenance help protect your customers, it dramatically affects your chances of ranking on Google too.
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Regular Backups
Regular backups are the final piece of the security puzzle when it comes to maintenance and security.
A backup ensures that no matter what happens, your website will have a failsafe that can be restored, ensuring you keep all your business-critical data safe.
There are a multitude of things to consider when doing backups, like what type of business it is, where the backups are stored and how they will be accessed in case of an emergency.
Generally, e-commerce businesses require more frequent backups, as they store lots of customer data. There are multiple ways to create and manage backups, the most secure way to manage them, however, is to speak to your web host as they can create and store them on their server, meaning even if your website has issues, there is a backup stored in a separate location.
Summary
Website maintenance and security can seem overwhelming, but it’s important to note that consistently staying on top of everything is a much easier (and cheaper!) task than waiting until everything breaks and trying to fix it after.
Regular maintenance brings many benefits to your websites, including the ability to make constant updates and tweaks, allowing you to optimise your website one piece of the puzzle at a time, delivering a more complete, secure user experience that is improving constantly based on user feedback.
Not only do you get the benefits of working on the website step by step, but this method also saves you time, money, effort, and stress in the long run.
Lastly, you get the peace of mind of knowing you and your customers don’t need to worry about anything malicious happening to your website and that you’re protected if the worst-case scenario does happen.
Not quite sure if your current website maintenance and security are protecting you? Get in touch with the team at Oraco today.
