15 Jul Are You Neglecting Website Maintenance? Here’s What Can Happen

Website maintenance… What is it? Why is it so important?

There are a lot of benefits to having a website. Aside from being the face of your brand online, a website makes you more reachable by your audience, builds your credibility, offers a convenient avenue for advertising, and creates opportunities for you to grow as a business.

With all these amazing benefits, it would seem natural to make sure that your website is maintained regularly to keep it up and running all the time. After all, even a minute of downtime could already affect your rankings and lose you a lot of money.

But you could still be one of the many business owners who still neglect website maintenance and here is what could happen if you continue this practice:

Your website content will be outdated

“Content is king,” the experts always say. But that’s because good content can really take your website—and business—to greater heights. Content also plays an important factor in search engine optimisation and what you put out will help you build your credibility in the industry.

With these things in mind, having outdated content due to poor website maintenance—or the lack of it—could hurt your image significantly, pull down your rankings and make you lose customers and money.

But having fresh and relevant content could do wonders for your business—from boosting your marketing campaign to helping you ensure a steady stream of income.

Your website will become more vulnerable to threats

It is no secret that the Internet is a playground for scammers and identity thieves. Every year, millions of websites are hacked, and important data are stolen to be used for identity theft, illegal purchases and even crimes.

So, with everyone doing their best to make their website as secure as possible, neglecting maintenance will make you more vulnerable to these threats.

For instance, if your platform releases regular core updates, missing them would mean not getting major security patches that will make your website more secure.

Plugin updates are also important for functionality and to delete security threats, most of which are malware that could potentially steal important information from your business and your customers.

Poor website maintenance = more downtime

A study conducted by Gartner in 2018 revealed that the average cost of a network downtime is £4,400 per minute. That means that you could potentially lose £237,000 per hour, which is a lot if you are a small business.

Beyond profits, website downtime can also hurt your productivity, which will cost you more money since it takes at least 23 minutes for an employee to get back on track with a task that was interrupted by a downtime.

If you neglect website maintenance, you will experience more downtime, which also translates to more losses for your business.

You will even need to go through the hassles of recovering lost data, fixing bugs, and spending on new systems when you could’ve just hired a team to maintain your website and spend less for it.

Your website could lose Search Engine rankings

Building a website is more than just about earning more but also about growing your business. So, if you want that to happen, you need to be on top of your game in terms of optimizing your website.

When you neglect website maintenance, you will start to fail the ranking factors set by search engines like Google in raking your website.

For instance, a lot of customers leave a website that takes 5-6 seconds to load. This affects customer experience and it could be a red flag for search engines to decrease your ranking in organic search results.

Google is also on the lookout for websites that get easily hacked and once it happens to your website, Google will instantly remove you from its list of ranked websites.

You risk losing your customers

This year, there are roughly 2.05 billion online shoppers around the world. That is 26.28% of the world’s population, which means that more people are making purchases through websites.

A lot of businesses are aware of this fact and will capitalise on it by making sure that their website is accessible, functional, and fast.

Now if you do not maintain your website, your consumers will start to experience errors and other difficulties in accessing and making purchases on your website.

According to studies, 69.57% of shoppers abandon shopping carts due to downtime or loading delays. That translates to at least £14 billion in sales revenues each year due to cart abandonment.

But aside from losing money, you are also risking losing the customers you tried so hard to win over. By neglecting website maintenance, you will give an impression to your customers that you do not care about their convenience and it could easily make them lose loyalty towards your brand.

Your business could end up in failure

Although not everything about your business relies on your website, neglecting it could have a huge impact on your revenue, reputation and of course, your brand. The competition is extremely high these days that a simple mistake could already end up in failure.

So, if you do not want to lose everything you worked so hard on just because you are too lazy to maintain your website, you need to start thinking about website maintenance today.

The takeaway

You can never put too much emphasis on the importance of good website maintenance, as it allows you to ensure excellent customer experience by making you more accessible to customers.

A well-maintained website also keeps your data secure, so you do not have to worry about important customer information being stolen in your system.

Most importantly, your website reflects your brand, so you need to make sure that you are putting your best foot forward every time.

There is no one perfect website, that is for sure. But with good maintenance, you can get as close to being perfect as possible by avoiding errors, downtimes, bugs, hacks and other factors that could stop you from serving your customers better and growing your business while you’re at it.

SEE OUR WEB MAINTENANCE PLANS

Resources:

Anologix: The Importance of Routine Website Maintenance

Zero Zen: What Will Happen if I Don’t Maintain my WordPress Website?

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Software and Website Maintenance