Understanding the benefits of our website maintenance service
30 years ago, Tim Berners Lee proposed a system for sharing information between computers, eventually becoming the world wide web as we now know it. Cyberspace changed everything. Today, information is instantly with anyone anywhere on the globe, all with the simple click of a mouse button.
As is human nature, society quickly utilised the internet to harvest as much of our favourite crop as possible… money. New avenues quickly opened up and an online presence became an important part of any serious organisation. Nowadays, you’d be hard pressed to find many businesses that don’t have a website in some shape or form. Do you provide car insurance? Get a website. That’s where everyone shops for your service these days. Sell vintage clothes? Get a website. Implement an e-commerce platform and sell your trendy sheep skin coats to the world. Wash windows? Get a website! Your customer base will rocket when they can place orders and pay online.
The internet has opened up no end of avenues to be exploited. Rich veins of digital booty waiting to be mined. And all you need is a few 0’s and 1’s – no grubby knees in this gold rush.
But our dependence on the internet does mean that we’re playing on the high stakes table when it comes to the importance of our website. It’s security, functionality and reliability should be right at the top of your list of priorities – if your site isn’t doing its job, you’re going to struggle to do yours. Our bespoke support and maintenance to fit your needs and make sure you’re never a man down.
Over the last few years, instances of hacking and cyber breaches have dramatically increased, and show no sign of slowing down. The best way to protect against these online pirates, is by being proactive and ensuring all aspects of the site are up to date – closing the loopholes that hackers love to exploit.
To explain a little more, we have divided our maintenance up into 4 key areas: backups, updates, security and performance.
Some weren’t impressed at the time, but let’s be honest, the Sun has been known to miss the mark on more than one occasion.
Backups
In the event that part of the site, or entire thing goes wrong, backups are absolutely essential in being able to roll back your site to a time when everything was working as it should.
Our robust servers backup all our hosted sites every four hours, storing copies of them off site. This means nothing is ever lost or permanently damaged.
Updates
It is a common misconception that once your website is built, it will keep going forever. Just let it tick over doing its thing for the rest of time. For almost all website owners this unfortunately isn’t the case and upkeep is essential. There are web packages out there that run back-end software updates, but they also don’t come risk free and can leave your website up to date, but not necessarily functional.
Because WordPress is under constant development, the code that underpins all appearance, and functionality is ever evolving. These developments are passed on as handy packets of data called updates. And boy do they come regularly.
Our sites consist of a core (the website itself) a theme (the code that dictates what your site looks like) and plugins (modules that add extra functionality). These three areas all have their own updates for a range of reasons including: security, new features and bug fixes.
As part of our maintenance, we log in to the back end of your site once a week and update everything, from the core and them to the plugins and builder.
Security
There are a number of security benefits to keeping up with web maintenance, no matter how big your website is, data breaches can impact even the most successful business. It takes as little as one leak for customers to lose faith in a brand and jump ship to a competitor, never to return.
50% of all instances of successful hacking and data breaches on WordPress sites occurr as a result of out-of-date assets. The easiest way to keep your data safe, and compliant with best security practise, is by regularly updating your website and associated plugins.
Establishing a website maintenance plan will help ensure your website is safe and secure.
Performance/Technical SEO
One of the best long-term methods of having people find your website is through search engines like Google (which powered more than 73% of all searches in 2018).
Of course, paying for ads on search engines and social media is an option; and is a great short-term way of coaxing users to your site. However, for many businesses this type of advertising costs can quickly mount up and become a burden on the budget. So, why not get more people finding you organically using something called Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO?
It isn’t just a matter of people finding you in the search results and then coming to your website. It doesn’t happen that easily. It requires proactive work – both on and off page. On page SEO is about optimising what users are able to see and interact with like text readability and image quality. Off page encompasses more technical, performance-orientated aspects like page load speed.
Whilst there are some aspects of maintenance that fall into the on-page SEO, such as image optimisation and keeping blog pages active, it’s mostly technical off-page changes that will keep your website ticking boxes for Google.
Our hosting packages are super reliable, with great speed – giving you the best start when it comes to SEO and customers not only finding your site, but staying there.
Conclusion
Of course, the main reason you’re going to come to us for a website design, is because you trust us to create one that’s aesthetically top notch, on brand and responsive across all devices. But our follow-on maintenance and support is why in the long-run, you’ll be recommending us to others. You can rest assured that once your new site is up, live and performing, that’s how it will stay!
