Like a Car, Your Website Needs Ongoing Maintenance 

Your website is built during a time of need for your Online Presence. Rather it is a new startup site or a site that needed a Re-Design. Your website is live and now there we can just update content here and there and we will update or upgrade the site later on. That is what causes a potential crash, fatal error or a potential major bug repair project. You are going to spend just as much money either fixing  the problem later on or you are going to pay for a brand new build because it has been too long to get your website updated.

Agencies and freelancers mostly offer recurring methods for ongoing maintenance, server support and other itemized things offered per month for your website. Ongoing Maintenance can help these problems so that as a monthly payment on top of the new website build can keep you up to date, on top of the search engines, secure and fast! These factors are extremely important to your online presence. 

Why is this Important?

The answer is simple, it keeps your site up to date, your website speeds, being up and healthy, security and overall rankings on search engines at a consistent rise. You keep growing the aspects of your website such as more features, rich content and strategy to get more leads online. If your site is not up to date with current programming standards, your site could be down within an instant based on a new update or many other factors could come your way that could bring your rankings down or literally compromise your data. 

Your search rankings are extremely important and if a new SEO standard comes out, an Ongoing Maintenance and Updates Plan can help you stay on top of those standards such as keyword updates and other SEO trends.

Yours and your potential customer’s security could be compromised if you do not have some sort of ongoing security in the website if you do not put an SSL Certificate or have a Malware Scanner and Firewall attached to your site. Bots come and go, and they will find their way into your site regardless of how well it is coded. If it is left alone or not monitored for too long, you could be in some danger there as a hack or any malicious intent happens to your website, it can hurt your rankings and also potentially harm you and your customers if you own an E-Commerce website. 

On the programming side, technology is always changing, just like SEO. Functions, syntax, objects and much more programming standards may change over time as well as the current version of the language that supports your site rather it is PHP, Python, JavaScript, Java or ASP.  For example, many businesses are on PHP 5.6 and are at risk of a potential compromise in their website’s integrity as Security ran out for PHP 5.6 well over a year ago. Say a version of your code is not supported on a specific browser and displays an element on your site the incorrect way or breaks your web page, then you are at risk. If you are not following W3C Standards which can update, you are at risk to take a hit at your rankings online, same thing goes if your site is slow because your site is poorly coded. 

Even for design, things do change. If you stay stuck in 2013, you might lose opportunities to get more business due to interactivity and creativity in 2020. If your average phone size for the site does not resonate to the latest standard median of mobile or tablet size, you may get flagged for your site being unresponsive by some SEO scorers online. Someone might not even take your business seriously and will go with someone else online as they have a better design in a navigation system that compliments the current time.

Let alone, there is also the idea that you can continue to upgrade your website with new pages, functionality and design upgrades. This can help your site keep up to common web design trends, SEO trends, trends to your industry and potentially getting a continuous gain in how your website could be more usable than your competitors.

It is going to come back to haunt you later on if you do not get Ongoing Website Maintenance and Support. Not just a potential fatal error showing up on your front page or a major load of work on the programmatic or server side of the website, but the dollar sign is not good. If you let your website sit too long, the work just piles on, and Developers and Agencies are going to come to you and explain the same thing that it is going to cost a lot to get it fixed. 

A website may be complete in the eyes of an average consumer upon launch, but the website is never finished as most developers know. Don’t ever leave your website to run dry, because it come back and do the same thing to your presence online in the years to come.