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5 Reasons to Keep Up Website Maintenance

You have a new website. Great! It looks fantastic and offers website viewers everything they could want and need from your brand. You are thrilled with the way it turned out. Now that it is built, you don't have to worry about it again...right? It will be live on the web as you run your business and go about your life. Not quite. While that sounds great, there are some basic things you need to do to maintain your website. If you don't do them, your new, good-looking, and well-running website won't stay that way for long.

What is website maintenance?

Website maintenance is simply the act of regularly checking your website for issues and coding mistakes, as well as keeping it updated and relevant. There are quite a few tasks that should be done to keep your website running smoothly. A good website development partner can check that all of your pages are loading without errors, run a backup and make sure a previous version of your site is stored, and make updates to website software and plugins.

The reasons you need ongoing website maintenance are numerous. They include:

1
Improved SEO

Website maintenance should be done on a consistent basis in order to keep your website running smoothly, encourage continued traffic growth, and strengthen your Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This means you want your website to consistently rank well and actually improve on Google rankings.

2
Website security

If there are vulnerabilities in your system, someone with ill intent could get into your information and the information of your customers. Most website providers can apply regular updates to combat newly-found threats but if you haven’t logged into your dashboard for a long time, you could be behind on literally dozens of updates.

3
Better visitor experience

When your team fixes your website and keeps it in good working order, you give your visitors a better experience. A better experience on your website means they are likely to stay on your site longer, reading, shopping, and learning about your services.

4
Faster site loading times

When you properly maintain your website and have everything up to date, your website will run faster. If you make visitors wait more than a few seconds when they open a new page or click on a link, they are going to look elsewhere to make their purchases. Research proves this!

5
Better brand imaging

Your website represents your brand. A website that looks old, takes a long time to load, has broken links, or seems suspicious isn't the impression you want to give to potential customers.

You wouldn't buy a brand new car and skip regular oil changes and tire rotations. Your car would eventually break down. Just the same, you don't want to set your new website live without professional website maintenance. Your website is an important part of your business and brand. Making the choice to maintain this asset, instead of letting it degrade over time, means you benefit in a number of important ways - and so do your customers! The Data Driven Design team is here to help.

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