How do the most successful online businesses stay ahead of everyone else?
It’s not always about who has the fanciest design or biggest marketing budget. Nine times out of ten it comes down to something far less glamorous – but much more important to the success of any business online:
Website Maintenance Services.
Without regular professional support, even the most elegantly-designed website can slowly deteriorate under the surface. Security flaws start to pile up. Plugins become incompatible. Load speeds gradually increase. You get the idea. By the time these problems become visible, it’s often too late.
Before jumping into why maintenance is so important, here’s what you’ll learn:
Here’s what you’ll learn:
- Why Maintenance Services Are Important
- What Happens When You Ignore Your Site
- What Website Maintenance Services Should Include
- Signs Your Site Could Use More Support
- Why Successful Online Businesses Outsource Web Support
Why Maintenance Services Are Important
Let’s start off with a simple fact.
Websites never really reach a point where they’re 100% “done”.
Running a successful website is a lot like running a car. Sure, you can buy a luxury sports model that performs better than most. But even that still requires regular servicing and maintenance.
Leave those oil changes long enough and it’ll grind to a halt on the highway. Kind of same principle with every website online.
Website support services are there to prevent these problems from happening in the first place. Whether it’s keeping on top of security vulnerabilities, updating software, improving speed and performance or conducting regular health checks. When your site is being maintained on a monthly or weekly basis, these necessary tools make sure it runs smoothly day in and day out.
Which means sites that are well maintained will rank better in Google. Simple as.
And the better your rankings, the more money your site will make.
Pretty straightforward when you think about it. A fast and secure website will always outperform a neglected one.
What Happens When You Ignore Your Site
Okay – here’s the bad news.
By the time you start to notice your site is slow or acting weird… it’s likely the damage has already been done.
Many website owners don’t think about their site until something goes wrong. That pretty much guarantees the damage has already occurred. According to recent studies, nearly 42% of website downtimes are caused by updates not being applied quickly enough or security vulnerabilities being left unchecked. If you’re putting off maintenance, you’re literally rolling the dice every time something new comes out.
You can even forget about weekly maintenance schedules if you want – each day your plugins, themes and overall software aren’t being updated your site is at risk of being hacked. And outages don’t just hurt SEO, they financially harm your business too.
As a matter of fact, global statistics show that 93% of enterprises say downtime costs them upwards of $300,000 per hour. Your site doesn’t need to be serving millions of users each month for an outage to cause serious damage. Even smaller businesses can lose weeks of profits if something unexpected happens.
Longer downtimes also cause serious trust issues with your customers. Sure, half of consumers will give your site a second chance if it crashes. But that still leaves 64% who won’t. Many will bounce immediately and find an alternative business to fulfil their needs.
Again, problems that could have been prevented with proactive maintenance services.
What Website Maintenance Services Should Include
You’d be surprised how many businesses think maintenance is just one singular service.
Having someone come in and “check your site makes sure everything’s okay” is just the tip of the iceberg. Probably falls under website health checks – but a true maintenance plan goes way beyond that.
SEO checks are great, but do they monitor security threats? Keep your plugins updated? Ensure nothing breaks if an update goes live? What about your site speed?
Once you dig into it, there’s a LOT that can go wrong. So here’s what you should expect from your maintenance service. Done regularly.
- Security Monitoring
- Software Updates
- Plugin Updates
- Performance Optimization
- Backups & Recovery
- Uptime Monitoring
- SEO Checks
Everything In-Bounds. All the time.
You want updates to be applied and new content to go live without breaking your site? Monthly maintenance services will take care of that for you.
Think of maintenance as a continual hands-on approach to your website’s overall health. The best services run tests and scans on your site daily, not once a month.
With the global website maintenance services market expecting to reach USD $15.6 billion by 2032, you can bet that businesses are taking their online presence seriously.
Signs Your Site Could Use More Support
Alright – enough with the tough love.
It’s time to face facts. Are you neglecting your website? Take this quick quiz and find out.
Did you answer YES to any of the following?
- Your site has noticeably gotten slower over the past few months
- You’ve seen an increase in 404 errors across your site
- Google Search Console is showing security warnings
- Plugins, themes or your CMS software isn’t up to date
- You’ve seen a decline in organic search traffic and aren’t sure why
The sooner you realize your site needs extra support, the better. These types of problems can spiral out of control in a matter of days. Leave them unchecked for longer and you could be looking at full-on downtime.
And as we’ve already discussed… website maintenance is always cheaper than playing catch up.
Successful Online Businesses Outsource Their Web Support
Here’s the thing about running your own business.
It takes a TON of time and attention. Hours you could be spending fixing slow page speeds and troubleshooting errors are hours being taken away from you to help your business grow.
That’s why the most successful online properties don’t even attempt to handle their maintenance internally.
They hire outside support to maintain their sites for them.
Take care of site maintenance with a professional team and you’ll reduce your site’s risk of downtime by over 80%. Most businesses won’t see those kind of recovery numbers when they experience an outage.
Want another reason why?
Think about security breaches and slowdowns. They aren’t going to wait until 9AM – 5PM, Mon-Fri to happen. Maintaining your site with a dedicated team that works around the clock is one of the best investments you can make as an online business.
Here’s The Bottom Line…
The most successful online businesses don’t leave things up to chance.
They know something can fail at any moment. And they always have plans (and processes) in place to manage it.
Site maintenance is not a luxury, it’s a necessity. Websites lose rank, make less money and provide a poorer user experience without it.
Don’t be the business that falls behind because you were hoping SEO disasters wouldn’t happen to you. Prepare for them ahead of time with regular website maintenance services.
