10

Key

Benefits

of

Hiring

Website

Maintenance

Services

There’s a lot that can go wrong with a website.

On average, website outages cost businesses billions of dollars per year. Websites sit in a difficult nexus of business strategy. They’re often as important as a brick-and-mortar store but are much more prone to failure.

But how can businesses take care of their website without deviating from their day job? To answer that question, businesses are turning to the experts to protect them.

Below, we’re looking at 10 key benefits of hiring website maintenance services.

1. Protecting Your Brand

Customers can’t respect your brand if you don’t respect it yourself.

Outages are the equivalent of an employee caught napping on the couch when they should be working. It’s a bad look and it suggests poor management. Once or twice might be an exception, but when it becomes a pattern it reflects on your business.

Before long, your business gets a reputation for unreliability. Customers stop visiting, and your brand becomes a joke.

But it’s not only about outages. If outdated plugins leave your site looking like the ghost of Geocities past, then customers won’t respect your brand. You’ll look like an amateur.

Trust is vital to your customer relationship. A bad or absent website reduces customer trust in your brand. Your website is the face of your online presence. If it doesn’t work or looks a mess, then your company as a whole will give the same impression.

If you respect your business, you’ll make sure your brand always shows its best face. That means a modern, responsive site.

Website maintenance services will secure your site’s uptime and protect your brand identity. Your customers might not notice when everything is working, but they’ll appreciate it.

2. Staying Updated

The internet is in a rapid state of evolution right now and you need to keep up to date.

Plugins and standards change all the time. Security concerns, better functionality, and compatibility are all behind the slew of updates needed to keep your site healthy.

Customers expect a site to function well. That’s not only on desktop, but across a multitude of devices. Consumers now open more sites on smartphones and tablets than they do on desktop devices. If your site isn’t up to date, you’re losing out.

But obsolete tech leads to bigger problems, too. Hackers love an outdated system – it’s a giant target.

Keeping your site current is the only way to give your site its best chance of resisting an attack. Your website maintenance services will update at-risk elements of your site to meet security standards.

Customers will also appreciate an updated site. They’re more likely to return to a site that works well. If your site is slow or difficult to navigate, they’ll look elsewhere for an alternative.

3. Consistency for Customers

The evidence is very clear – the thing that customers value most in a business is reliability.

75% of customers say they expect consistency from a service. Customers need to know your services are there whenever they need them. If a service like Amazon dropped out every few days, there’s no chance it would become an industry leader.

You also need to consider the impact this has on customers. Not only does it block new customers from joining you, it also locks previous customers out of support services. If someone already has a complaint, it won’t improve their opinion to encounter a website that doesn’t work.

Hiring website maintenance services can reduce your downtime, and therefore promote consistency. The more your customers can rely on you, the more they’ll keep coming back.

Retention is the key to building a long-term customer base. By showing you’re a reliable brand, you increase your chances of retaining your customers. That leads to an overall growth in your reputation, bringing more custom through your doors.

4. Reduce Lost Business

Naturally, outages also have a more direct impact than a lack of consistency: They lose business.

It’s likely your website is also your online storefront. In that case, any downtime at all automatically means lost revenue. The longer the downtime, the more the problem compounds. Soon, word of mouth will stop even larger volumes of customers from visiting your site.

Unless you can afford to take huge hits to your revenue, you need a reliable site. Website maintenance services can reduce the chance of downtime, and prevent lost business.

Lost revenue goes deeper than having less pocket money. You need to have a realistic idea of your finances to create your business strategy. If your income has a random chance of drying up, your plans could go out the window.

Uncertainty isn’t the foundation of a stable business. By protecting your site, you protect a structural aspect of your operations. That allows you to create solid plans based on hard data.

If the worst should happen, your maintenance service will also give you an idea of the problem’s scale. That could turn a complete unknown into something you can plan your way around.

5. Peace of Mind

Nobody wants running a business to become one long nightmare. If you’re failing to switch off at night because you’re fretting about aspects of your business, it could be time to call in the experts.

Employing website maintenance services is one good way to do this. It puts a vital aspect of your business in the hands of experts. That’s one less thing to worry about.

It also ensures you’re not always on call. Website maintenance services can handle attacks even when they occur in unsociable hours. They’ll help you put together processes they can trigger even when you’re not around.

Peace of mind is an undervalued resource for business owners. It maintains work-life balance and helps you keep a clarity of purpose. Your business won’t scale up if you insist on doing everything yourself, so this also shifts your mindset toward relying on others to get the job done.

Fear of the unknown is one of the most basic fears. Having website maintenance services on retainer gives you a chance to dispel those fears and focus on the positive side of operating a business.

6. Focus On Your Core

Modern businesses can often expect to spin a lot of plates at once. And there’s always the risk they’ll come crashing down.

Each activity that takes away time and money from your core business could weaken your position. It’s a death of a thousand cuts which could leave you barely functional. The list of distractions is endless: compliance, promotion, environmental targets and so on.

Hiring website maintenance services is a great way to ensure your website operates without becoming a distraction. Instead of wasting time troubleshooting, you can focus on delivering your core business to your customers.

Outsourcing these tasks can also relax stresses on your internal structure. In-house staff requires support, management, and benefits. For a fixed fee, you can get a maintenance service to deliver the work without the baggage.

The business which can focus on its core has an advantage over its direct competitors. As they struggle to keep the plates spinning, you can concentrate on employing new strategies.

7. Getting Expert Help

You can’t expect to be an expert in everything.

Small business owners often make the mistake of thinking they can handle everything themselves. They won’t consider the impact of handling all the support services that go along with running a business.

Even if they do try to take these tasks on themselves, they’ll never reach peak efficiency. Their own lack of expertise prevents them from making effective use of their time.

If you have to spend hours researching the fix for a site problem, you’re wasting both time and money. Instead, you can leave it to the experts. Website maintenance services might cost money, but you’ll make that back on the productivity you would otherwise waste.

This expertise is also preventative. Website maintenance services know how to deploy tech and best practices to prevent outages in the first place. They can take steps you wouldn’t even consider to protect your site.

It’s not about what you don’t know. It’s about what you don’t know you don’t know. Only experts have the in-depth knowledge to cover all the bases.

Accepting limitations, that you can’t know everything, is a major step on the road to a successful business. Acknowledge that using experts can help bring out the best in your company.

8. Strengthening SEO

Good SEO is vital to making your site visible to customers. But it’s an ongoing task to keep your site’s SEO up to scratch.

A website maintenance service can ensure that your site and content conforms to good SEO practices. They’ll check everything from your content to your URLs to your images to provide the best SEO possible.

But search engines frequently update their algorithms to cut down on abuse and provide a better customer experience. Your site may have good SEO today, but that’s no guarantee it’ll still be good tomorrow.

Maintenance services won’t just maintain your current SEO. They’ll also stay on top of these changes to keep your site on the cutting edge of SEO.

Discoverability is still one of the big problems facing businesses. Ironically, the internet only makes it more difficult. There are larger audiences out there than ever before, but they gravitate toward the brands they know.

SEO is one of the tools a company can rely on to get noticed. But that only works if your SEO is effective.

Website maintenance services will protect your place in search rankings by handling the technical side of SEO. That means improved discoverability for you – and more revenue.

9. Defending Yourself

The digital world is at war. Every day, hackers compete with security experts to destroy websites and access data. It’s a constant arms race of technology.

If you exist online, you’re at risk. No site is 100% safe from hackers.

But what hackers enjoy most of all are sites run by amateurs. Cybersecurity is an entire industry in itself. It takes years to develop the knowledge needed to protect vulnerable systems.

Hackers exploit that lack of knowledge to gain access. As we’ve mentioned, hackers love out-of-date software common to amateur sites.

All this adds up to sites without maintenance services providing a very juicy target for bad actors. As the internet continues to expand, the risk of an attack grows with it. Shoring up your defenses gives you the best chance to compete in a digital world at war.

If you don’t take steps to protect your site, you’re inviting hackers in. You wouldn’t leave your premises unlocked at night, so there’s no reason you should do the equivalent with your site.

But it takes expertise to protect a site. Like we said above, acknowledging that you don’t know everything is the key to delegating to a team that does.

10. Access to Backup and Rescue

Websites will always be vulnerable to hacks and crashes, even with the best tech available. That’s why backup and rescue plans are key to staying in business.

You can reduce your risks with best practices. But when the worst happens, you need a plan in place. Good backups could mean the difference between recovering from a problem and shuttering your business for good.

A maintenance service will make certain your website uses the right technology to ensure continuity of service. They’ll discuss procedures with you in advance, so everyone knows what to do in an emergency.

They’ll also make sure you have rigorous backups of your data. Without good backups, database corruption could take out your site entirely.

Website maintenance services can help you bounce back from an incident. With some luck, your business will continue without interruption. Compare that to the collapse of your company, and there’s no competition.

Hiring Website Maintenance Services

In a digital world, your website forms a vital part of your brand and your business.

The points we’ve covered illustrate how professional maintenance can be the difference between success and complete collapse. If you want to succeed, consider hiring website maintenance services to stay ahead.

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