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Your website is the forefront of your business. Do you give it the attention it deserves? All websites require regular maintenance in three key areas to ensure they’re performing their best. Unfortunately, backend upkeep is not immediately obvious to your website visitors. As a result, it’s often ignored. We want to share the reasons why it’s important to focus on your website behind-the-scenes so that it performs better for your business on the front lines.
Revisit Your Website Hosting
The website host you choose affects the loading speed of your site, and the customer service they provide becomes critically important any time your website has a problem or goes offline. As with many decisions you face for your business, the least expensive option is not always best. When choosing where to host your site, consider your technical requirements as well as your customer service expectations before letting cost guide your decision.
Hosting a website with your agency gives you one place to call for all your web needs, saving you time and effort. It also allows you to speak with someone who knows you, your business, and your website, so every support call doesn’t have to start from square one. When something goes wrong, you can call a trusted expert whose team has the incentive to help you fix the problem quickly and correctly. Think about how much easier it is to understand, communicate, and implement changes with one point of contact. When determining where to host your site, consider not only your current technical requirements, but the changes and challenges that will come over time. Who will be able to help you best, when you need it most?
Conduct Regular Website Maintenance
While it may be possible to maintain your site yourself, the work involved can be tedious and time-consuming–which makes it easy to put off, or forget about entirely. Many agencies offer regular maintenance services, to relieve you of this burden and ensure your website stays up-to-date and secure. Whether you intend to maintain the website yourself, or enlist an agency’s help, don’t cast it aside as an afterthought or it could cost you valuable uptime.
If you decide to maintain the site yourself, know what you’re getting into. Stay on top of needed patches and updates, and stay informed about performance and security issues. Be aware that updates can sometimes cause issues. If an update isn’t compatible with your server or your site’s code it could ‘break’ the site and take you offline. An experienced developer can immediately troubleshoot the problem, or roll back the changes while finding a solution; but if you’re maintaining your own site and run into a problem, not knowing what to do next could lead to extended downtime, while you seek help.
Take a Hard Look at Your SEO
Search engine optimization is not something you do just once and then quit. Your website’s SEO reputation is built over time and should be continually nurtured. The SEO landscape is always changing (along with Google’s search algorithms), so don’t “set it and forget it.” Instead, your SEO implementation must be refined, tested and tweaked over time to maintain or improve your organic rankings. Without the time, knowledge, or experience required to do it right, your site won’t be performing for you as well as it should.
Keep in mind that regularly adding fresh, relevant content to the site is good for both SEO purposes and attracting/retaining visitors. Producing organic content is a win-win!
While these behind-the-scenes optimizations are less obvious to your website visitors than your photos or your messaging, consider how each affects your bottom line, and where your time is best spent. If you’re taking time away from other tasks to work on your site, that’s attention you could focus on growing your business.
If you have comments or questions about maintaining your own site, please get in touch. We’re always happy to help.
