Why Should I Maintain My Website [In 2022]

Although it can be tempting to see your website as a set-it-and-forget-it marketing tool, doing so can drastically limit the effectiveness of your overall marketing efforts.

Your website is more than your online business card – it should be viewed as an active marketing channel that can bring in new leads and sales.

Website maintenance is vital to ensuring your website performs optimally and doesn’t hinder your overall marketing efforts. In this post, we’ll get into why maintaining your website is so important, as well as what needs to be done.

Why is website maintenance so important?

There are a host of reasons why maintaining your website is so important, from keeping your content up to date to ensuring your visitors can navigate your website properly. In This post, we’ve focused on the three main reasons why regular website maintenance is so important. These are: to improve the user experience, to improve your SEO, and to ensure the information on your website is accurate and up to date.

User experience

Your website’s user experience refers to how easy it is for visitors to find information and interact with your site. A good user experience creates a frictionless sales process, helping you make the most of every lead that comes in.

Many different things could worsen your website’s user experience over time, bugs being a good example. Bugs can make your website very difficult to use, causing visitors to leave before reading about your products or services.

The same thing goes for your website’s speed since slow load times can result in a higher bounce rate.

Although there are many others, these are two of the most common issues that hinder your website's user experience over time. Both of these issues can occur by themselves due to a lack of maintenance, even if the website was developed to be fast and bug-free initially.

They could be caused by plugins or add-ons that need updating, the underlying technology the website is built on needing to be updated, or even caused by your web hosting package or user-generated content!

SEO

Your website is generally considered the centrepiece of all of your marketing channels, with social media and even direct sales directing potential clients to your site. However, it should also be seen as a marketing channel in its own right since the site can drive search engine traffic directly.

Website maintenance helps improve your website’s performance in the search engines by making sure your website can be crawled easily, contains accurate and up-to-date information, and the user experience is good.

Improved visibility in search engines with a SEO agency service will, in turn, help generate more leads and ultimately improve your website’s overall performance.

Updating information

Keeping content on your website up to date will ensure your visitors have access to the information they’re after. This doesn’t just include the updating of contact information, but also adding or removing product/service pages.

Updating content also has a range of secondary benefits, including increased crawling by search engine crawlers and opportunities for cross-promotion.

How often should website maintenance be carried out?

How often website maintenance should be carried out will depend on your company and how your website is used. A company that sells products directly on its website is going to require more frequent website maintenance and testing than a company that predominantly uses its site as a reference for clients to find information about them.

That being said, on average, it’s best practice to go through your website every four to six months or so to see if there’s anything that needs updating, although this could be significantly more depending on your business model.

The most important website maintenance tasks

There are hundreds of website maintenance tasks that could be required depending on your website/situation, and it would be impossible to list them all in this post. However, a number of these are required by nearly all websites. These are:

1. Updating Plugins/add-ons
2. Checking And fixing bugs
3. Updating Content on the site
4. Speed Testing and optimisation
5. Creating a backup of the site 

Outsource to a professional agency

Website maintenance is a never-ending task that can take up a lot of time. Outsourcing the maintenance of your website to a professional agency can save you time. This allows you to focus on your core business and ensures the maintenance is carried out on time and in the best way possible.

Here at Racer Marketing, we offer website maintenance support in the UK and internationally, alongside a range of other website and marketing-related services. If you're interested in outsourcing your website maintenance, please get in touch to find out how we can best support your business.