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Why On-Going Website Maintenance is Crucial to Your Website's Success
As a business owner, you've invested a lot of time and money into creating a website that uniquely represents your brand and showcases your products or services. You've launched your website and are now kicking back, and enjoying the benefits of having a strong, lead-generating, digital home for your business.
However, launching your website is just the beginning of your journey to success... Maintaining your website is equally important as the initial overhaul, to ensure it continues to function properly, continue to bring in hot leads, and provide a positive user experience for your visitors.
This is where a website maintenance retainer comes in. A website maintenance retainer is an agreement between you and a web designer or design studio to provide ongoing support and maintenance for your website. This can include tasks such as updating apps and plugins, fixing bugs, optimizing performance, creating fresh content, adding to or updating your website copy or other content, and adding new features. Every designer and studio is different, and their maintenance offerings may vary, so be sure to ask your designer about their maintenance services, if they offer any.
We wanted to outline some of the best and most important reasons why a website maintenance retainer is crucial for small business owners after you've launched your website...
Optimal Overall Website Performance
A slow-loading website can negatively impact user experience and lead to a high bounce rate. Regular maintenance can optimize your website's performance and ensure it loads quickly. For example, if you don't know how, or aren't taking the time to compress images before adding them to your site, the longer you continue to do this, the slower your website is going to be. This is just one example of how your website speed can be compromised post-launch if you don't have your designer doing this for you.
Maintained Optimization for Search Engines
Search engine optimization (SEO) is essential for driving new traffic to your website. Regular maintenance can help improve your website's SEO by ensuring it meets current standards and best practices. One thing that greatly impacts SEO, is creating fresh, new, relevant content and adding that to your site regularly. Google is looking to you to continuously add helpful, detailed, meaningful content that is relevant to your audience's search intent, and as the business owner, if you are being pulled in 100 different directions, and you don't have any time in your schedule to create thought-out, relevant content for your visitors, your web presence could fall to the wayside.
Despite what some people think, blogging isn't dead and is a highly effective way to bring in new traffic to your website and can even be the starting point for creating the rest of your content for other platforms. When you work with Thrive Design Co on your site, and have a website maintenance retainer in place, one of the deliverables we include in all our maintenance plans is blog content— 1 per month, 2 per month, or 4 per month depending on which plan you choose.
Creating new blog content isn't the only factor at play when it comes to keeping your SEO where it needs to be. Other factors that come into play that I often see overlooked and not kept up with post-launch are things such as:
Not adding good, descriptive alt tags to every new image that's uploaded
Not using the proper heading hierarchy when adding new headings and titles to new or existing pages
Lots of spelling and grammatical errors
Not making sure you're regularly checking your website's mobile view after you've made updates to your site
And more
Continually Positive User Experience
A well-maintained website provides a positive user experience for your visitors. with every visit, which has the potential to lead to increased engagement, more conversions, better customer loyalty, and more time spent on your site. Did you know that 57% of users won't recommend a site that's poorly designed, and 88% of users won't return to a website after a bad experience? Not taking your website's ongoing performance and design into consideration can really hurt your business, and your SEO, and cause you to miss out on quality leads.
I've seen this happen one too many times, so don't let this be you. Not to mention, if you spend all that money on your initial website design or overhaul, and then do nothing to maintain it, or maintain it poorly, it's not going to serve your business at all, and in fact, it can really undo all the hard work your designer put in for you to be successful. That's like working hard to lose 20 lbs, then going right back to all your old bad habits and gaining all of that weight back. Your efforts (and money) were wasted, and no one wants that!
Lots of Cost Savings and Less Headache
Investing in a website maintenance retainer can save you money in the long run by preventing major issues that could require costly repairs or even a complete website rebuild later on down the road. Trust me, you don't want that. Having a website maintenance plan in place, where your designer is regularly keeping up with your site can help prevent issues before they even occur, and can help issues that do arise, do minimal damage, if any.
As opposed to if you don't have a website maintenance retainer in place, and you let issues with your site go for too long, this could create a whole spiderweb entanglement of problems, and when you do finally decide to have your web designer come back in and fix the issues, it could be a very long, extensive, process, which means you're going to be left with paying a lot more money than if you were just having your site regularly maintained.
When choosing a website maintenance retainer, it's important to find a provider that offers a comprehensive package that meets your specific needs. So, if after reading this, you've decided you want to put your best foot forward and maintain the quality, online rankings, and professionalism of your business' website, definitely check out our website maintenance plans. We offer 3 comprehensive maintenance plans for different budgets and needs to help make sure your Wix or Squarespace website is giving you optimal results and that you don't have to worry about taking time out of your hectic schedule to maintain your site.
To Recap
So, in a nutshell, a website maintenance retainer is an essential investment for any business owner who wants to ensure their website continues to function properly and provide a positive user experience post-launch, maintain your website's rankings in search engines in order to bring in more new leads and visitors, and those who want to save themselves a lot of money and headache by preventing issues from happening or stopping them before they become big issues.
By choosing a reliable web designer from the get-go, and one that offers website maintenance services, and by committing to ongoing maintenance with a plan that best suits your budget, needs, and goals, you can protect your website from threats or issues, improve its performance, and ultimately drive more traffic and conversions to help build your business and revenue.
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