These days, your website is your business. You can’t survive without it. It is a necessary investment for any company and it pays off in the long run. After spending valuable resources on the design and the development of your priceless website, don’t you think keeping it up-to-date would be of the utmost importance? Of course it is, which is why website maintenance is equally as important as the construction of your website itself. Maintaining your website isn’t easy though. It can cost you a lot of time and money; especially if you aren’t very proficient at it. This is why outsourcing your website maintenance could be the most sustainable option in the long run for your business.
The benefits of website maintenance are easy to comprehend. Your website is a constant portal between visitors and your company. The condition and relevancy of your website is a direct reflection of the condition and relevancy of your business. This is why website maintenance is so important. Downtime of a website not only gets penalized by Google and could affect your search engine rankings, but it will also make visitors question the legitimacy of the company. Out of date content is another negative thing Google and customers will notice. There is also the constant threat of having your website hacked, which can have a serious impact on your business if it is not dealt with right away. These are just a few of the things that can have a very detrimental impact on your business if your website is not constantly maintained. By neutralizing these threats you can begin to understand the intrinsic benefits of website maintenance.
For most companies it is not fiscally smart to hire or dedicate one person inside the organization to manage its website maintenance. The expertise and time needed from one person to effectively manage a website is daunting, stressful and prone to mistakes. This is why it is common to outsource the maintenance of business websites. Depending on the website maintenance package, you can get a dedicated team of experts monitoring your online presence for a fifth of the monthly price of an in-house expert. These experts will monitor and maintain your website for an agreed amount of time per month. They will save your company precious time and resources while making sure the heart of your company is always running smoothly.
What kind of website maintenance packages are there you ask? This really depends on the outsourcing company. Most begin with starter plans for the simpler websites. This usually entails around one hour of proactive website maintenance a month. It may not sound like much, but for a small business website that doesn’t have too many pages, one hour is enough to make sure your website is running smoothly and up-to-date. From there the packages can really vary, but are usually tiered, based on hours of maintenance you get per month and the complexity of your business website. The premium website maintenance packages can be so in depth they are virtually a full website support team for your company.
The amount of support hours are not the only metric to look at when deciding on your website maintenance company. There are intangible things included in every plan that make a company stand out or not. These things could include hosting, domain management, website backups and restores, content changes, graphic optimization, product changes or additions and other helpful things that can be extremely important to keep your business website running at an optimal level.
As you may have noticed throughout this article, the benefits of website maintenance are as important as the website itself. It is essential to make sure your company’s website runs smoothly all the time, which is an intimidating task that doesn’t need to be stressed over. Outsourcing your website maintenance will keep you focused on growing your business and keep your website from hindering it.
