What Is Included In Website Maintenance Service?
Any business strives for a good online presence. However, not many business owners know that having a well-maintained website is crucial as it contributes to overall business growth. Website maintenance services help to ensure the websites are running efficiently while meeting the business objectives or goals. In this article, we explain everything you need to know about what is included in website maintenance.
What is website maintenance?
Website maintenance is a set of tasks required to ensure a website is performing optimally and running on the latest updates. The tasks include checking if all functionalities are working as they should, updating the website content, and ensuring security measures are carried out efficiently.
What is included in website maintenance?
Here are several major website maintenance services that are typically included:
1. Updating website content
Website content must be updated regularly, especially if the information changes frequently. Some examples of content that require updating are your products or services and contact details. You can also post regular updates through news or blog posts regarding relevant information about your industry. Not only will it help to keep your customers engaged, but it will also improve your website’s overall SEO.
2. Security audits and checks
With advanced tools these days, websites are prone to various security vulnerabilities and threats from hackers or harmful individuals. Therefore, regular security audits and checks are included in website maintenance to ensure all plugins, software, and other aspects of the websites are protected against security vulnerabilities. This also includes preventing spam bots from filling up the forms automatically or commenting on your website.
3. Updating the website’s software
It’s important to update the website’s software on a regular basis to prevent security vulnerabilities or performance issues. When the software is outdated, some functionality may not work efficiently, leading to poor performance. The software updates include the plugins, themes (if relevant), content management systems (CMS, if relevant), and security patches.
4. Data backups and disaster recovery
When unforeseen circumstances like a major security attack happens to a business, all of the data could be compromised or lost. Hence, regular data backups are important to ensure the data are kept safely during unforeseen circumstances. Proper disaster recovery measures should be implemented and set in place for emergency purposes as well, which is usually included in website maintenance services.
5. Website speed
Ensuring your website loads quickly is also part of a website maintenance routine. Regular checks on the website speed help to boost SEO rankings and make it a pleasant, smooth experience for users while they browse your website. Some tasks to improve the website’s speed are compressing the images, using browser caching and minimizing HTTP requests.
6. Optimize the site for mobile
As users tend to browse websites on mobile devices more these days, optimizing the website for mobile is one of the services included in website maintenance. This means that the website has to adapt to different screen sizes easily without making it hard for users to navigate.
7. Enhancing user experience
Websites need to offer a good user experience by ensuring the navigation is seamless, filling up forms is a breeze and other common usability aspects. During website maintenance, the web designer will carefully analyse the user’s behaviour before coming up with the right steps to take to improve the user experience.
8. Website performance monitoring and optimization
Regular monitoring and optimization are important to identify potential issues and ensure the website is performing well. The common tasks included are checking for any performance issues such as high bounce rates, low conversions or broken links.
9. Fixing of bugs or issues
It’s also important to identify the potential bugs or issues early on before they become worse. Regular checking for bugs or issues is included in website maintenance services to detect them early and come up with appropriate measures. The common tasks and checks include form functionalities, broken links, broken layouts, and coding errors.
10. SEO implementation
Search engine optimization (SEO) is part of website maintenance as it involves making changes to the website to gain organic traffic and rank higher on search engines. The best practices for SEO include inserting appropriate headers, updating the meta tags, optimizing content for keywords, and updating image ALT text.
11. Website analytics
It’s recommended for businesses to regularly monitor the website analytics and observe the data. This helps to identify any potential improvement that can be made to boost the overall marketing efforts. The website maintenance provider would usually monitor, track and produce reports based on the recent findings. Through analysing the website, businesses are able to come up with solutions to achieve their goals and meet business objectives.
What are the factors that affect website maintenance services?
There are no standard website maintenance tasks that work for all websites as it depends on several factors. Here are the factors that influence the maintenance services required:
1. Website size and complexity
If the website is a large, complex website such as e-commerce, it may require a more comprehensive approach to maintain. This is because there are more pages as well as other advanced features and functionalities to inspect.
2. Website software or platform
Different types of websites require different approaches to website maintenance. For instance, e-commerce stores will have different requirements compared to a media publication or corporate website. It also depends on what the website is made with – such as a content management system (CMS) or custom-built websites created from scratch.
3. Website hosting provider
The website hosting company also play a role in how much maintenance is required. Shared hosting plans generally will need more maintenance as the websites are prone to various security risks and vulnerabilities.
Conclusion
To conclude, it goes without saying that website maintenance is important for any business that wishes to maintain a good online presence. Engaging with professional website maintenance services could help boost your digital presence as well as increase sales or conversions. Learn more about how much website maintenance costs in Malaysia before you consider engaging with a professional.