Why Website Maintenance is Not Optional And How It Boosts Your SEO

More Than Just a Pretty Face: Why Website Maintenance Matters

Your business’s website is its public face. It is critical to how you present yourself to clients and a business asset that will grow in value as your business grows. 

As an asset to your business, your website should be treated with the same care as any other physical asset, such as a car or property. Your website must be maintained to remain aligned with your brand and ensure it keeps performing from a user, business, security, and performance perspective. Website maintenance is critical to your ongoing SEO maintenance and strategy. 

Infinite Creative can help you every step of the way, no matter if you need full support or limited support. Call us now.

The Hidden Costs of Neglect: What Happens When You Skip Maintenance

Search engines, such as Google, prioritise content and performance. If your website presents a poor user experience, Google will penalise your business in SERPs (search engine result pages), ultimately hitting your conversions and bottom line. 

You might not think this is an issue because you are using other marketing strategies, but technical SEO also impacts your performance in ad campaigns, such as AdWords.

In fact, according to a Google study, for every 10 seconds it takes to load a site, the bounce rate increases by 123%. Potential leads moving on impact not just organic search results but also marketing campaigns. Further studies have found that every second counts for your customer and their journey. According to a study by BigCommerce, every second lost in load times can cause a 7% decrease in conversions.

Website Security Impact

Website security is another crucial aspect of ongoing maintenance. Bad actors (hackers) constantly find new ways to exploit website vulnerabilities for fun or to make financial gains from individuals and businesses. Staying on top of core software updates and monitoring mitigates this risk as far as possible. Occasionally, more complex changes are required to stay ahead of the risk, these can be time-consuming for a business owner with other priorities.

A study by GO-Globe found that 80% of businesses with a data breach or a failed audit could have prevented it by patching on time or doing configuration updates.

SEO Supercharger: How Maintenance Fuels Your Search Rankings

Search engines have one real objective: to provide users with the best search results possible. Recently, the big search engines have even labelled this. For instance, Google recently released an HCU (Helpful Content Update). Many websites saw a massive decrease in search impressions, impacting conversions.

These updates sought to penalise generic, often AI-generated content that offered little value to end users and did not present a unique angle. The algorithms used by the search giants are becoming increasingly advanced by the day.

Website Maintenance – What Google Wants

To keep the content fresh for a user, search engines favour:

• Website Speed Optimisation: Slow pages impact SEO and conversions.
• Device or Mobile Responsiveness: Google is aware of the device being used; it, therefore, prioritises mobile-friendly pages
• Updated and Unique Content: Fresh content shows that your website is not dormant, and that helps with SEO results
• Security: Bing and Google favour secure websites; in fact, they are starting to delist certain insecure pages.

Beyond the Basics: The Scope of Effective Website Maintenance

After understanding why maintenance is so essential, let’s examine the scope of website maintenance.

Website Maintenance Plan

• Content Maintenance – You have posted great content, it is important to ensure that you maintain it. Content often contains links, both internally and externally. Checking these links to ensure they remain valid and functional is vital. Links help users, and Google find their way around your site and its content.
• Software Updates—Minor and major software updates keep your site updated against security vulnerabilities and running optimally, helping with technical SEO maintenance.
• Server Maintenance—Your server, the place where your website lives, will need maintenance from time to time. This is not too dissimilar to your website in that it will need to be kept up to date not only so that your server can present your website optimally but also to avoid security breaches.
• Website Security – Maintaining the software that runs your site helps to keep it secure, but you also need to ensure that bad actors do not have other means to access it.
• Website Backups—Should the worst happen, your backups allow you to restore your site to the nearest revision in a very short time. Your backups should be separate from your website and taken on a daily basis.
• Software Licensing—Software is a paid commodity. Maintaining active licences allows you to keep up to date with the latest versions, which is essential if you want to stay on top of security updates and performance updates.
• Monitoring—Who monitors your website to ensure that it is running day in and day out to represent your business at its best?

DIY or Delegate? Why Professionals Are the Smart Choice

As a small or medium-sized business, there are undoubtedly many things you need to stay across to keep your business running, such as paying staff, ordering stock, and so on. 

Recognising that you are already stretched, we have developed plans to support you in taking the hassle out of maintaining your site. We offer everything from a basic package to a fully hands-off package. If you’d like to maintain your site, we also offer training and a manual to help you understand what you need to do.

Partner for Success: Infinite Creative’s Maintenance Plans

Infinite Creative’s professional website maintenance and SEO plans offer plenty of benefits. Long-term website health is essential to maintaining SEO success. Using one of our bespoke plans will save considerable time and effort, not to mention stress.

Contact us to discuss the options; there is no obligation. We monitor uptime, software updates, and backups – the lot. We can also help you with content delivery and even write content for you. However, you will need to approve it!