What is Website Maintenance? The Ultimate Guide

Why is Website Maintenance Important?

• The Majority of Customers Conduct Online Search: Nowadays everyone searches for everything online. 87% of people conduct online research before buying a product. That is a huge number and an equally great opportunity for you to be found out by people and to leave an impression on them. While searching for products or services related to your business and finding your website, their experience with your website should be good. If your website does not attract the attention of your visitors then they will go to your competitors’ website and you will lose valuable leads. So your online presence is the backbone of your business growth.

• Your Website is the First Impression on Your Customers: Your website shows how professional you are. The visitors that come to your website can be potential customers if their experience with your website is impressive. If that goes wrong they will not visit your website again. They will rather do business with someone else with a professional website. The perfection of your website tells how seriously you take your business. Customers may lose interest in your website due to grammatical or typing errors and irrelevant content. It is necessary to keep the interest of your customers in mind. Website maintenance comes with security and software updates that increase the speed of your website and provide new features that can lure customers to your website.

• The Sales Growth Depends on Your Website: Your website takes the charge of directing your visitors to purchase your products and services. This ensures that your sales grow. For an eCommerce website, the transactions are an important part. If your website does not function properly the transactions will be unsuccessful and you will lose valuable customers. If you want to do serious business you must have a well-functioning website.

• Visitors Judge the User Experience: 89% of customers prefer to do business with your competitors due to the bad user experience of your website. The better the user experience of your website the more customers you can retain. The sales of your business depend on the user experience. People will be willing to do business with you when the user experience of your website is impressive. If it takes more than a few seconds to load your website then the visitors will not stay and the bounce rate will increase.

• Improved Security is a Part of Website Maintenance Plan: Bugs, hackers, and cyberattacks can cost you a fortune if you do not get rid of them in time. They are threats to the security of your website. They can sometimes crash your whole website and you will have to build the website again. The investment you would have made to build the website will all be futile. Around $15.4 million are spent by U.S. companies per year to tackle cyber attacks. There is a lot of sensitive information about your customers on your website that should remain private. If your website is not secure that information will also be jeopardized. You will end up losing the trust of your customers and your website may face downtime.

• Website Maintenance Supports Your SEO Strategy: The bounce rate of your website should be low for it to have a good ranking in the search engines. If the customers leave your website within a few seconds of arriving then the bounce rate will increase which will be bad for your Google ranking. The traffic to your website will decrease eventually. The other defects that hamper your search engine rankings are outdated website design, structure, or content, security or technical issues, etc. Your website must always appear updated because an outdated website can not rank well in search engines.

Steps for Website Maintenance

Website maintenance is a detailed process and involves many steps. All of these steps are important if you want to get results and should not be skipped. However, you should see whether these steps are relevant to the kind of website you have or not. The steps are as follows:

1. Detailed Review of the Whole Website

Go through all the pages of your website to see whether there are any errors. These errors can be dysfunctional features, broken links, slow load time, outdated content, absence of meta tags or content descriptions, grammatical or typographical errors, bad user experience, erratic formatting, etc. This step should be followed annually and after every update.

2. Security Update

This is one of the major steps to keep your website secure. Your hosting provider and web developer should make sure to install security patches, bug fixes, and upgrades as soon as they are released, otherwise, your website will be vulnerable to malware attacks. These updates also influence the CMS, operating system, database, and webserver. The updates should generally be done every month or when they are available. 

3. The Functionality of the Forms

Call to action forms and check-out process of any website must be functional all the time. These forms are business opportunities that get hampered if the forms do not work properly. After every update, you should check whether the forms are working properly or not. For regular website maintenance, it should be checked quarterly.

4. Domain Name Renewal

If the domain name of your website expires it will be given to someone else. Losing your domain name will be a great loss which is why you should renew your domain name on time and every year.

5. Report Analysis

You must keep an eye on the general website analytics, its performance in the search engines, and the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to analyze the potential of your website. This way you will be able to know what is dragging your website down and fix it. This report will also make your plans more effective.

6. Browser Compatibility Assessment

As everything is going digital you never know which browser a person will use to search you. It will be good for your website if it is compatible with popular browsers and their different versions like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, etc. Your website should keep up with the latest technologies and you should check its compatibility at regular intervals.

7. Website Backup

Keeping a backup of your entire website can be handy for your website if anything goes wrong. You should also keep a backup of your website in a remote location before it installs any update so that data can be retrieved in case of any failure. Regularly backup your website and you can recover the latest version of your website. The interval between the backups is totally up to you but ideally, website maintenance service providers should keep weekly or monthly backups.

These are the general steps that everyone should follow for website maintenance. Apart from all this, anything that is outdated on your website should be updated to optimize the performance.

What are the Different Ways of Maintaining a Website?

1. In-House Developer You can have in-house employees for website maintenance. The benefit of doing this is you will have dedicated staff focussing only on website maintenance. However, it is a costly affair as you will have to employ individual workers for each field like domain and hosting, content, design, development, etc. There will be as many employees as fields and you have to spend money to pay them. If any of the employees leave the whole process of website maintenance will be disrupted. Pros Dedicated staff will focus only on website maintenance You will have all the resources at your disposal.    Cons You have to hire multiple people who are experts in various technologies such as Web Developer, Web Designer, Domain & Server Manager, Content Writer, etc.  It's costlier than any other options available.  Recruiting talents is another cost you have to bear.  Any team member leaving the team will break the process.

2. Freelance Developer: This is a cheaper way of doing website maintenance as you just have to pay one person and only for the amount of work they have done. With this method, you can save money but your priority will be compromised because freelancers have many clients to serve. As one person will be dealing with everything the quality may get compromised as well. If you hire different freelancers for different processes there will be more expenditure and a lack of coordination. Pros This is a cheaper way as you just have to pay one person. Cons Your priority will be compromised because freelancers have many clients to serve. The quality may get compromised as one person will be handling everything. If you hire different freelancers for different processes there will be more expenditure and a lack of coordination. Security is the major concern when opting for this option.

3. Reputed Website Maintenance Agency This is an all-in-one method. If you subscribe to a website maintenance company you will have a team of professionals dedicated to your requirements. It can be a little costly but not more than hiring in-house developers. These companies have experts in every field and give proven results. You will be given dedicated time and priority. They also provide reports regularly. The resources needed for website maintenance, like marketing, strategy, and programming services will be available in one place at your disposal. Pros You will have a team of professionals dedicated to your requirements. These companies have experts in every field and give proven results. You will be given dedicated time and priority. Regular reports will be provided. The resources needed for website maintenance, like marketing, strategy, and programming services will be available in one place at your disposal. Cons It is a bit costly.

4. Do It Yourself Some people do it themselves. There is a lot of risks involved in this process as it needs technical expertise in case of any failure. You can lose your website entirely in the process of saving money. It is advised not to do it yourself as it involves many tasks.  Apart from all this you also need to invest a lot of money and time in this task which will stand in the way of other tasks that need your attention. Pros Everything will be in your hand, so you can do as you wish. Cons There is a lot of risks involved in this process as it needs technical expertise in case of any failure. You can lose your website entirely. You also need to invest a lot of money and time in this task which will stand in the way of other tasks that need your attention.

How much Does Website Maintenance Cost?

The maintenance cost depends entirely on the type of website you have. The services you need are also a big part of the cost. Before hiring professionals to do the maintenance you must first see the services they provide and their cost. Three factors decide the price, they are- personnel cost, hosting cost, and tool cost. 

Different types of websites and their costs are as follows:

1. Small Blog Website Maintenance: These personal websites have low maintenance costs ranging from $99 to $299 per month. It can also be done free of charge with the help of blogging sites like Google Blogger. These websites do not have big traffic and have lesser needs. You can do it yourself where you only need to pay monthly for hosting service and domain name renewal with the help of platforms like WordPress.
2. Small Businesses Website Maintenance: Around $110 is the maintenance cost of small business websites per month. These websites need repeated maintenance, backups, updates, and marketing which is why the cost is a bit more. Customized services are the need of these websites.
3. Corporate Website Maintenance:  A maintenance cost of $200 to $999 is required for corporate websites every month. If it is used only for the purpose of marketing then the price can be low. With regular backups and updates, these websites can be easily maintained. It is advisable to do this with professional help. It makes your business hassle-free and you can take care of the other important tasks.
4. eCommerce Website Maintenance: The cost for an eCommerce website can be $199 to $999 per month. This costs more because there is so much content, customer information, and code customization. Regular maintenance should be done cautiously and preferably by professionals as it needs technical support. Web maintenance packages and services are a great solution for eCommerce websites.

Additional charges can be there for different services that require the website to keep running. They are:

1. Domain Name Renewal: For the creation of a website, a domain name is necessarily purchased. It is the address of your website. If you do not want someone else to buy your domain name you must make regular payments. These payments can be both monthly and yearly. The general cost of domain names is $3 to $5 per month and $9 to $14.99 per year. 
2. Website Hosting: There are many options to host your website. You can both take the help of a hosting service and do it yourself. It would cost $70 to $190 with Wix or WordPress. An economic option is a shared host where your website shares the server with many other websites. The cost is $25 to $120 per year. If you want to own a server only for yourself then it can cost between $1200 and $24,000 every year. It is called a dedicated server. One more option is the VPS (Virtual Private Server). Here you share the server with other websites but with the benefit of having a dedicated amount of server space that is provided by the provider by dividing the server into many VPSs. 
3. SSL Certificate: SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer. This certificate ensures the security of your website. Without any threat, your website can transport and collect sensitive data. With hosting services this certificate can be accessed free-of-cost otherwise you need to pay for it. The higher encryption rate that comes as an advantage with an SSL certificate is advantageous for your business. A website having an active SSL certificate has HTTPS in its URL instead of HTTP. It also has a padlock symbol before the URL. The cost of an SSL certificate can be $2 to $25 per month and $25 to $300 per year. These payments are necessary to keep your website safe

Website Maintenance Advantages: ROI of Maintaining Your Website

To save money, some people do not even think of investing in website maintenance. With this approach, you will end up with damages that will cost you even more and you will not be able to undo these damages. Compared to the expenditure to recover your website, website maintenance costs lesser and is worth it. It would rather improve your ROI. Some of the advantages of website maintenance are:

Better Website Performance:
With website maintenance, your website will perform better than usual. The better performance will bring more traffic to your website and help the growth of your business. Visitors do not stay on sites that take more than a few seconds to load. According to data, if it takes more than three seconds to load then the bounce rate increases to 32%. This can be prevented by taking help from professionals who know website maintenance like the back of their hands.

Higher Rank:
Website maintenance comes with better security for your website. For your investment in website maintenance, you get an SSL certificate and HTTPS for your website. These factors improve the rank of your website in search engines as a result of being a secure website. 

Lower Website Downtime: 
With better security, timely plugin updates, and regular website backups the chance of your website going down reduces. The more downtime the more revenue you will lose. You will also lose traffic and eventually essential customers. Instead of taking all these risks reap benefits like 24/7 uptime monitoring and 99.9% website uptime with website maintenance. 

Beat Competitors:
Upgrade your website with new and updated content to keep your visitors engaged. This way your website will come to the minds of the visitors whenever they want to learn something new and the traffic will increase. Search engines give preference to websites with updated content which is a great benefit of website maintenance. 

Save Time:
Professionals take lesser time to do website maintenance as they have expertise in this area. Both the time and the workforce used for website maintenance are saved this way. This time can be utilized to perform other important tasks. Outsourcing website maintenance is a better option than employing people for individual updates or services as it saves money. You get a good ROI by spending less money. 

What Does Website Maintenance Include?

Different providers include different services in their website maintenance packages. Apart from that they give added services to people who need them. Website maintenance, in general, includes checking the functionality of the website, tweaking security issues, updating content and graphics, updating software, etc. It is recommended to take the help of professionals because some maintenance tasks need technical expertise. Professional services also know how to handle a situation when the website crashes during an update because they keep backups. Some of the services that are usually included in website maintenance are given below.

• Complete Website Check-Up:  Your whole website is tested to find the faults in it. This process is repeated after updates as well to ensure the functionality of the website. These faults can be outdated or wrong content, broken links, and features that do not work. These faults are corrected so that the forms and checkouts on your website work properly. The usability of your website is also tested.
• Software Updates: Updates are tested on the staging site before applying them to production. The critical software like the CRM of your website should be checked for updates. For CRMs like WordPress themes and plugins are monitored and maintained.
• Browser Compatibility Test: Your website should be compatible with the commonly used browsers and also some of the less used browsers. Website maintenance helps your website if it is incompatible so that more customers can reach out to you from different browsers.
• Website Backup: If you have subscribed to a website maintenance service, they usually have automatic backups. You can also backup your website manually but store it in a remote location. It is necessary because it saves time and money if anything goes wrong. The website can be restored anytime with the help of backups. This way your website does not have to face any downtime in case of any trouble. These backups should be done either weekly or monthly according to your preference and need.
• Key Metrics Analysis: Tools like Google Analytics can be used to analyze the key metrics of your website. To see whether your targets are being achieved or not check the KPIs (Key Performace Indicators). Updates and maintenance are supposed to strengthen the performance of your website.
• Security Check: There can be spam and bugs in your website that threatens its security. Before doing any updates the security standard of your website is checked and the bugs are fixed. Some web maintenance packages do daily scanning to deny the entries of spammers and hackers.
• Speed Check: The loading speed of your website is a very important factor that decides whether your visitors will stay or leave your website. If it takes more than a few seconds they tend to leave. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insight can be used to check the speed of your website. Website maintenance speeds up the loading time of your website.
• SEO: Search Engine Optimization is a major part of website maintenance. The aim of SEO is to lift the rank of your website in search engines. Proper keywords are used in the content of your website to make it more visible.
• Content Update: You can do it yourself to get rid of the redundancy of the content on your website. Fresh content attracts more visitors. Maintenance service providers usually do it if you request them to and as per your preference.
• Domain and Hosting Management: These technicalities are a bit tricky but with web maintenance plans you can get industry-recognized security and cutting edge hosting services. This affects the uptime of your website in a good way.
• Regular Reporting: Web maintenance services provide reports on a monthly basis usually. Detailed reports on what has been done to your website for maintenance are given by the provider. Google Analytics report of site traffic details and page views is also provided to you for you to analyze the performance of your website. 
• 24×7×365 Monitoring: The website maintenance team keeps track of the uptime of your website all the time. Whenever the website goes down for any reason they get an alert. They resolve the issue as soon as they can to eliminate the downtime of the website to save you from huge losses. At the end of every month, you also get the uptime monitoring report.
• Feature Upgradation: Website maintenance service providers incorporate new features into websites as per clients’ requests. They also integrate the new features that come to the market to keep you ahead of your competitors.

What Is Not Included in Website Maintenance Service?

Website maintenance does not mean taking care of everything regarding your website. You must know what is not included in website maintenance so that you can update your website accordingly. Some of the tasks that are generally not included in website maintenance are:

• Media Editing
• Media Creation
• Content Writing
• Website Redesign
• Navigation Redesign
• SEO Services
• Interactive Features
• New Site functionality

How to Choose the Right Website Maintenance Company for Your Business?

You must first examine the compatibility of the website maintenance company with your expectations. There are some factors that you should take into consideration before choosing the company. They are- services offered by the company, the pricing, reputation of the company, years of experience, etc.

The Services Offered by the Company
It is important to find out whether the company you want to work with offers the services you are looking for or not. If they do not match hiring them will be a complete wastage of time and money. You should first list out all the services you need for your website and then tally them with the services offered by the company. If not this you can also check whether the company offers the basic services that any good company does. These basic services comprise:

1. Make sure there are no broken links.
2. Providing plugin and software updates.
3. Enhancing the loading speed of the website.
4. Updating the images and graphics.
5. Correcting 404 errors.
6. Making the website mobile-friendly.
7. Doing security scan analysis.
8. Changing layouts, templates, and themes.
9. Updating the website design.
10. Updating content.
11. Posting blogs.
12. Renewing the domain.
13. Hosting the website.

Do the Services Come Within Your Budget?
You must set a budget for the services you want. This budget should consider all the aspects that decide the price offered by the company. You should first ask yourself some questions. What is the size of your company? How complex and functional is your company website? Does the maintenance cost of the service provider match your budget? Small scale industries require simple maintenance services whereas large scale industries need complex maintenance. These prices vary from company to company. So you should see which one suits your requirements the best.

The reputation of the Company
You should always work with companies that have a good name in the market. Browse that company’s website to do the background research. There you should check the client reviews and testimonials to know about the experience and level of satisfaction of the people who have already worked with them. You can also know about the professionalism of the company from the website. Grammatical errors and inconsistencies are not signs of professionalism. Look for the company on social media platforms like Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, etc. to know about customer reviews.

Years of experience of the Company 
You should always check how many years has the company been working in the concerned field. The more the experience the better will be the performance. The team working on your project should have professional and experienced employees. They must have worked on other projects. Before accepting them ask all the questions you have in your mind to be clear about their efficiency and performance. Keep in touch with them for regular updates.

How to Choose the Right Maintenance Plan

Make website maintenance an essential part of your business strategy if you want to grow. You must choose the right plan otherwise website maintenance can create complications for you instead of solving your problems. These plans differ from provider to provider. Check the packages of your service provider before taking any decision. This decision should be based on answers to some questions:

What is the frequency of changes required to your website?
The plan you choose must be in sync with the requirements of change requests your website needs. See which plan of your provider matches the best with the number of change requests you will be needing. This way you can save money as the change requests will be included in the plan itself and you do not have to pay anything extra, apart from the cost of the plan you have chosen. 

What is the type of website you own?
You must first define the type of your website. There are various types of websites like eCommerce, educational, business/corporate, social media, portfolio, etc. eCommerce websites need more maintenance than the other types of websites. Find an inclusive plan with detailed services that suit the needs of your website the best.

What is the framework of your website?
If your website is developed using any specialized framework or CMS then you should find a plan that deals with it. Your provider should have experts who have expertise in your framework. Professionals with knowledge about the technicalities of your framework should tackle its maintenance.

Do you need any customization?
If you have customized requests that are specific to your website then you should go for a plan that deals with them. Customized requests can be frequent product uploads, weekly content uploads, weekly listing uploads, etc. 

You should always discuss with your service provider before finalizing your plan. It gives clarification to you about whether your needs can be catered or not. The plans should also consider various intermediate maintenance activities:

Weekly Maintenance Activities

• Plugin and software updates.
• Inquiry form process checking
• Website backup and storage
• 404 error correction
• Checking and fixing broken links
• Blog posting
• Removing spam comments from pages and posts

Monthly Maintenance Activities

• Performance analysis
• Load speed optimization
• SEO optimization
• Review of security scans
• Website security optimization
• Website backup and storage
• Online customer support
• Turnaround time
• Checking and fixing broken links
• Website speed optimization
• Database optimization
• Inquiry form process checking
• Website statistics analysis
• Blog posting

Quarterly Maintenance Activities 

• Website’s responsive design testing
• Inquiry form process checking
• Reviewing meta descriptions regarding SEO
• Website auditing and optimization
• Reviewing and optimizing internet marketing and SEO strategy
• Review of website design and structure
• Graphics and image optimization
• Review of workload automation
• Website’s browser compatibility check
• Website backup health check

Annual Maintenance Activities

• Domain name renewal
• Content update
• Content optimization
• Website design optimization

Why is Aarav Infotech the Right Choice for Your Website? We have a team of professionals who exclusively work on maintenance services. We are easy to work with and provide reports regularly. Some of the services we provide are: CRM for Maintenance Life Cycle Ticket Management System Android and IOS App 20+ Monthly Preventive Tasks Remote Cloud Backup & Restore Detailed Reporting System Easy to Use Customer Area 4+ Ways to Raise a Ticket 24×7 Website Uptime Monitoring Onboarding Health Check-up Dedicated Maintenance Team Unlimited Standard Support No Hours LImit Defined Process in Place

Learn about Website Maintenance with Aarav Infotech

The reputation of your business is represented by your website. Therefore it is beneficial to have a smoothly functioning and error-free website. You can maintain your website yourself but it involves a lot of tasks. If you hire a Website Maintenance Service provider then they will handle all those tasks for you and you can work worry-free. One such provider is India’s first systemized website maintenance company, Aarav Infotech. Website maintenance is our niche. We have various website maintenance packages and all of them are budget-friendly. 

We are the one-stop solution for website maintenance with customized packages that offer services like updates, security fixes, domain and hosting services, theme customization, website optimization, and many more. You can study your own performance with the performance report of your website that we provide. None of the information on your website will be lost as we take regular backups. 

We also have packages based on the platforms you have used to build your website. For example, WordPress, Drupal, PHP, WooCommerce, etc. We give 360° web solutions starting from domain registration to digital marketing. Our costs can fit any pocket as our products serve every range of budget. A team of 30+ professionals is at your disposal specifically for the task of website maintenance. Use our 11+ years of industry experience to transform your business. Inculcate the latest technologies to your website with our service.

Choose any of the monthly or quarterly maintenance packages according to your convenience. This should be decided on the basis of the size and requirements of your business. List out the services you would like to have for your website and then choose the right package. You can reach out to us 24×7 at any step. Our proposals are crystal clear for you to understand that your trust matters to us. Our payment options are flexible. You can pay us using payment methods like debit or credit card, NEFT, net banking, EMI, UIP, wallet, etc. 

We take pride in calling ourselves India’s First Systemized Website Maintenance Company. We have years of experience and our target is your satisfaction. For your post-launch support activities, we have a dedicated maintenance team to assist you. Our processes are well defined and our program is the only program that does not work on an hourly basis, it rather works on the basis of projects. You have access to check your ticket consumption, ticket statuses, package features, etc. because we believe in transparency. One more advantage of our service is you get unlimited standard support. You can avail of our support easily from our IOS and Android apps as well.

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