Contents

• Introduction
• The Problem
• The Solution: Website Maintenance
• Can I Do It Myself?
• Can’t I Just Use Auto-Updates?
• Need Help?

Introduction

So, you’ve got your new website up and running – job done, right!?

Well, actually – a website is a bit like a car – it needs some ongoing care and attention to keep it running smoothly. Regular maintenance – like changing the oil and checking the brakes – keeps things functioning well.

The Problem

What might go wrong if a website is not maintained?

One of the things that could go wrong is that parts of your website could stop functioning. I saw one website that wasn’t being maintained adequately have its mailing list signup form suddenly stop working, preventing people from signing up to the mailing list. This could have been prevented if regular maintenance had been happening on the site.

Another problem area for websites that are not well maintained is security. One of the main reasons why the little pieces of software that make up your website need to be updated to newer versions is that the newer versions often contain security fixes which help keep your site secure. An un-maintained website is an easier target for being hacked or infected with malicious code like malware. As well as affecting the site itself, this may also affect how your website is ranked by search engines. If your website stores customer data (for example, email addresses collected for an email list) or processes payments, then it’s particularly important to keep things nice and secure.

The Solution: Website Maintenance

Like many problems in life, prevention is better than cure. The main thing to do to keep your website maintained is to update the various components that make up your website to their latest versions. To keep your website functioning smoothly, you should make arrangements to have this basic “website maintenance” done periodically.

When your website is nice and secure and consistently functioning well, your customers will have a smooth experience using your site, and this helps to build trust.

Can I Do It Myself?

Doing it yourself may be an option for some people. Here at Effective Websites, if you have us build a website for you, we can set your website up with tools which simplify the process for you to (with some regular time and attention) do the maintenance yourself. We would also provide a training video on how to do it.

The time to do this regular maintenance yourself can certainly add up though, especially if issues come up during your regular maintenance which you need to troubleshoot.

You may also come across some situations where you get in over your head technically – sometimes tricky technical issues can come up while updating your website – and working out how to resolve these yourself may require significant time (and stress!) too.

If you’d prefer to spend your time doing other things, like writing up some great new content for your website, or spending more time with your family or friends, then you can get us to do it for you.

Can’t I Just Use Auto-Updates?

Now you might be asking yourself, “can’t I just set my website to update itself automatically?” And that’s a great question. It turns out there’s one problem with this approach though: sometimes updating your website can cause it to break. This will happen in front of your website visitors – and that’s not a good look.

If you have a big website, you don’t need me to spell out the impact that could have – you know the difference between a site being up or down at any given moment is a measurable loss in sales (and perhaps harm to your brand).

If you have a smaller site, then getting a person to do your maintenance solves another problem that long-term website owners will know all too well – “out of sight, out of mind”. If there’s no-one checking in on your website from time to time, one day you may well find that something important stopped working weeks (or months!) ago and you hadn’t noticed. On the other hand, if you have someone do your website maintenance… you can relax, knowing that it’s being taken care of.

When you get someone to do your website maintenance for you, something helpful happens: at set intervals, it is someone’s job to give care and attention to your website. They can make updates in a controlled manner, checking if updates caused any issues and taking action.

Imagine a garden that’s left alone, with nothing but automatic watering, for a whole year. Now imagine another garden, where a gardener goes once a month and looks over the garden, carefully removes the weeds, and trims the edges. After a year, what will the difference be?

Related Services

…to have us take care of your website maintenance