So you got your brand new website all set up and it's just been launched. What’s next you're wondering?

Well, you will now need to decide whether or not you're going to need to hire someone to do maintenance. But you're thinking to yourself why would I need to hire someone else after I just paid all this money to get the website built.

There are many reasons we will discuss as to why a website needs to be maintained on a weekly, monthly or yearly basis but let's first cover the biggest one:

Fresh content

One of the best ways you can provide additional value to your clients or potential clients who visit your website is to continually offer fresh industry news, latest trends or innovations for them to brush up on. Or the promotions you are running. Really, anything that will keep your visitors coming back to your site over and over again and hopefully refer some of their friends and family members to your site.

If the site is not being updated with fresh new content or articles why would someone visit the site after the first initial visit? Why would someone refer your site to friends or family members if there's nothing really beneficial there?

Often we have clients who when building their website ask us if we can build them a Blog into the site. We often have them write and submit to us their first blog article so once the site goes live, there's at least one article in the blog. We offer them training on how to update articles and add new ones in the blog software. But then we go back to visit their site six months or even a year after its live and in the blog is that same article and only that article.

What perception do you think visitors to that site have when they go to the blog and see an article hasn't been written in over a year? It simply gives off the impression that the website owner doesn't care about its visitors and frankly about its business online.

By hiring a website maintenance company, updates to your website can be professionally done in a timely manner month in and month out keeping your website fresh for your visitors. Most website maintenance services have a creative writing team that can write informative articles about the industry or products you represent. So you don't have to take time away from your business to sit down and go through the daunting task of writing articles like a journalist.

Security

Websites nowadays, unfortunately, are a lot less secure than they ever were in the past. The reason for this is most of them are being run on content Management systems that have many back doors in them. A hacker can gain access to and take control of the site leaving you in the dark.

Traditional web sites of the past that we're hand-coded in HTML, CSS & PHP and other programming languages really had no back doors for hackers to access thus there was not so much of a need for monthly security measures or maintenance to be taken.

With a Content management system, often a new version of the software running that system comes out (sometimes even monthly), and that software needs to be updated immediately to close any potential security breaches that were left open since the previous update.

Also, most of the functionality that takes place in a content management based site is through plugins that have been installed. These plugins are from third-party developers and also can be a way of hacking into a website if the plugins are not secure and updated. You should update a plugin almost immediately when the developer puts out a new version.

If you have a Blog in your site and you allow comments on your blog articles there's, also some maintenance that's going to take place there as spammers are going to try and get their advertisement based comments into your site articles as much as they can. So managing the spam based comments is often a little bit of work monthly as well.

As you can see, having a content management based website requires more maintenance than a website has ever needed in order to keep a website secure and prevent it from being hacked.

Misc Upkeep

• Mobile Friendly Pages

Mobile traffic accounts for about six out of ten of your visitors so mobile testing must be done on a mobile device to ensure a good experience for mobile users. We often use Responsinator.com to test clients sites on mobile to ensure fonts are easily readable and images are sized properly and viewable.

• Optimization of Images

It is no secret these days that search engines use page speed and load time as a criterion on SEO although I see I was not really our thing we know that optimizing images on pages is important for quicker load times. So whether we install plug-ins that optimize and size the images down or we do it manually in Photoshop having images at the ideal sizes can speed page load times tremendously.

• Professionally done with a set time frame

By having a company maintain your website, you can ensure that updates will be done in the time you specify since you're paying for them. This is a much better alternative than having the neighbor kid or your brother-in-law who is a programmer do the edits as they will not only put your site top priority, but the work will not look professional as a designer would do it.

• Search Engine Optimization

Often keywords in a website need to be updated or changed in a website to reflect consumer trends. In order to maximize your exposure in search engines, you need to have an effective Website Maintenance Company who understands how the search engines work can allow you to stay competitive.

• Broken/Dead Links

There are many criteria your website is being ranked on by the search engines one of which is broken or dead outbound links. for websites that have a lot of pages 20 to 50 or more, this can be a difficult task of keeping up on. One of the other common website maintenance tasks that we complete for clients monthly is a scan of their website t ensure no broken links.

• Conclusion

We are Internet Solutions For Less, we maintain more websites that we build nowadays. Website security is more important than it has ever been with the popularity of CMS Systems. For this reason, effective website maintenance systems need to be in place otherwise you are going to be looking at large costs to undo the problems when they occur.