Running a business is a constant juggling act. As a result, it can be easy to let things low on your priority list fall through the cracks. Such things include website maintenance. However, it’s crucial to prioritize website maintenance, or your business will suffer.

In today’s digital economy, a company’s website is its single most important asset to communicate its brand and engage new prospects. Consumers turn to the web to educate themselves, with more than 80% of product research beginning as a simple web search. Ensuring your website and digital footprint are well maintained and monitored is the key to increasing traffic and generating leads. Here are 5 major reasons to perform regular website maintenance.

Broken Themes Can Leave Your Website Vulnerable

If you’ve been using a WordPress website for your business, you may have already encountered issues as nonupdated themes. This leaves you with outdated code, which can lead to slow downloading speeds and varying performance. Outdated code may even make your site unvisitable or incompatible with the latest popular browsers.

According to recent reports from Sucuri, WordPress website infections have grown from 83% in the year 2017 to 90% in the year 2018. Additionally, WPWhiteSecurity revealed that 73.2% of the popular WordPress installations are vulnerable. Viruses can slow down web traffic or shut down pages altogether, leading to higher bounce rates. They can also leave the door open to hackers, who insert malicious code into your site, redirecting visitors to phishing pages.

A website crash carries significant consequences. It can end up costing you a lot of time and money to return your site and your reputation back to its original status. As a result, you will experience losses in website traffic and dips in business overall. All of these risks can be mitigated by consistent website maintenance.

Update and Optimize for Industry-Leading SEO

SEO is a vital part of your website and should be updated often by an SEO specialist to ensure you follow the latest guidelines. There are significant changes to Google’s search engine algorithms that happen approximately every six months; however, Google is known for constantly making minor tweaks that can seriously throw off your SEO and affect your website’s ranking in search results.

If you aren’t already hiring experts to write top-notch content that accounts for SEO regularly, your SEO rankings could be suffering. Make sure to leave this to professionals, as poorly-created content can actually work against you, both with visitors and with search engines. Tactics such as keyword stuffing can lower the rankings of websites. So can low-quality or repetitive content.

Recently, Google has been creating new algorithms to judge your website content marketing, ranking you higher if:

• Content benefits users – your content brings value to visitors
• Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness (E-A-T) – your site presents relevant expertise
• Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) – content touches upon information that can impact big decisions among readers

Connecting Digitally has Never Been More Important

Today, the public has never been more reliant on digital connections and business websites. People often rely on your brand’s digital presence to help them judge your brand character before encountering your products or services in-person. This is why more brands are focusing their efforts on digital and inbound marketing. Doing so ensures that their prospective clients get the information they need to make a buying decision.

What’s more, as a result of COVID-19, 96% of B2B sales teams have shifted to remote selling. Without in-person meetings, B2B companies need to create optimal digital experiences for their potential customers. Additionally, 90% of B2B customers research 2-7 sites before they make a purchase. For these reasons, it’s crucial to provide users with quality content that differentiates your company from your competitors. A seamless omnichannel journey focused on improved customer service will have a direct impact on your bottom line, and regular website maintenance will ensure you stay on track.

Ensure Your Data is Safe and Backed Up

Think of your website as an extension of your business; it needs to be protected. Backing up valuable website content is crucial to saving you time and money in the event of hacking or other issues that might threaten your website. Backing up your data is vital, as many companies find their important business data like product orders, invoices, and database information is deleted during a security breach. Hackers can even access and exploit sensitive customer information. Such data loss (particularly if you do not have a data backup) can cripple your business operations for weeks or even months.

While hackers may target all businesses alike, older, out-of-date websites will cave under modern hacking tactics, as they are more prone to security breaches. However, “outdated” doesn’t necessarily mean ancient. Sites that haven’t been updated in just twelve months can be considered “outdated.” Regular website maintenance — including updating code, themes, and backing up data — can mitigate these catastrophic issues.

Integration Updates are Crucial

While exploring a website, many users place value on aesthetics. If your website looks old and bland, users can quickly develop content fatigue and leave your site or stop using it altogether. An outdated website template may not be able to keep up with all the new apps, plugins, and integrations available. To keep your site current and engaging, be prepared to update it on a regular 1-2 year basis and only use the most modern, up-to-date templates.

Many plugins and third-party web apps can be integrated into a website. These integrations can improve the customer experience and draw in more web users. Here are just a few examples of possible integrations you can leverage for your website:

• Social media
• Google Analytics
• Banners
• Payment gateways
• eCommerce plugins
• Content management systems

It’s important to remember that adding plugins may also mean updating your code, design, and technologies to make the website functional.

Regular website maintenance is the key to a successful digital presence, helping you to avoid business-threatening issues such as hackers, poor SEO rankings, data loss, unappealing aesthetics, and much more. If you’re interested in seeing how our team can keep your website up to date, contact our team of experts today.