A website is one of the most valuable assets a business can have.  As a business owner, you’ve invested a great deal of time, thought and money to craft this website. Isn’t it worth the extra effort to maintain the health of this hard-earned business asset?

I bet a lot of you are thinking: my site’s fine! It’s on the internet, it’s visible…what more could I really ask for?

It isn’t always obvious that your site needs help. In fact, by the time it’s crystal clear that help is required it’s often too late to act.

Let’s start with some of the tell-tale signs of a structurally unsound website. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Has your site gone untouched for 3 months or more? If so, this means that your site is out of date and vulnerable to cyber attacks.
• Does your site take longer than 5 seconds to load?
• Does your site have missing images?
• How about broken links?

If your answer is yes to most (or all) of the above, your website is likely to be suffering from at least one of the following:

• Lowered security
• Declining search engine rankings (where your page lands on Google for instance)
• Hacking and Malware vulnerability
• A frustrating user experience from increasingly slow load times (47% of online consumers expect a page to load in 3 seconds or less)

So what to do??

Websites are no longer meant to sit passively on the internet. Modern websites are living, breathing, participating members of actively growing businesses. They likely have built-in functionality that need regular updating. WordPress, for instance needs to be updated monthly to maintain good site health. If left untouched, your site will slowly deteriorate and become harder and harder to bring back from the dead.

Can you do this yourself? Absolutely!

If you or a member of your team is comfortable maintaining and updating your website, wonderful! Here is a quick checklist to get you started:

• Install the latest version of WordPress whenever you can
• Update all plugins
• Monitor your uptime
• Schedule regular database back-ups
• Check for security fixes and alerts
• Run performance optimization
• Run daily/weekly/monthly backups

Most of our clients are understandably reluctant to add these tasks to their growing ‘to-do’ lists. As a result, we have launched a Web Care Program to support websites of all sizes. These packages are structured to grow with any kind of business and give our customers peace of mind. In addition to monitoring, updating and backing up the site files we also offer varying degrees of dedicated support time. This means that you can have small changes and upgrades made to your site over time as part of the monthly cost!

If your business (and reputation) cannot afford to have a site that falls short, you need to consider ongoing website care. If you would like to learn more about the support we provide and the website onboarding process, please feel free to schedule a quick call.