In marketing, we tend to look at what everyone else looks at, especially when it comes to our advertising campaigns. Vibrant and engaging social posts, newsletters, mailers, and most importantly, a fluid, impressive website. Our website is literally our homepage, right? If we’re a retail business it’s likely that we have products and an eCommerce presence, whereas a nonprofit might have a gorgeous website aimed at telling a story and garnering donations and community support. Creating and developing a beautiful and efficient website is the first step, sure, but what happens after your website is built? It’s good, right? We wash our hands and walk away? Nope. In fact, that’s a resonating big nope from us. Website maintenance and marketing actually have an intricately symbiotic relationship, and we’re here to tell you why!

First off, let’s define website maintenance. We spoke to one of our in-house website designers, Jess Williams, and here’s what she has to say:

“Website maintenance includes a set of ongoing activities and services to help ensure a website remains up to date and secure. Website software developers release periodic and continuous updates that enhance and optimize websites. These updates are essential for keeping websites current and efficient. Website maintenance also includes new content and pages, e-commerce updates and formatting, and ongoing SEO updates.”

Website Maintenance and Marketing – Let’s Elevate Your Business’ Visibility!

Obviously having a gorgeous and engaging website is your first priority – after all it’s literally your digital front room. It should have all the components your business needs to portray your message, your product or service, and really catch your target audience’s eye. But once your website is finished, it’s imperative to consider website maintenance in your ongoing marketing plan. Below we’ve outlined a few of the most important reasons that website maintenance and marketing are intertwined!

Site Security

Site security in the digital age is one factor that really shouldn’t be overlooked. Hackers love a site that’s not optimized or updated. For designers that use developing tools like those WordPress offer developers, updates are an ongoing and important part of website maintenance. If you know the way around the backend of your site, these updates may be easy enough for you to handle all on your own, but be forewarned. These updates can be moderately frequent, and without them, your site isn’t up-to-date on security measures and optimization.

Website security is one of the most important reasons to keep your site current with updates and implementations. Hackers don’t just target the big boys, and let’s be honest, the big boys are keeping things on a pretty tight web maintenance schedule!

Hackers love an unsecured site, and while they may leave most small businesses alone, it’d be a shame to let something as simple as a website update hinder your upward momentum. Older, out-of-date sites are prime targets for even the tiniest of security infractions, and it’s not uncommon for people to brush aside the potential risk because their site is small.

Site Integrity

Updates can and do cause issues ranging from minor code fixes, or reloading themes or plugins. These are much easier to rectify one at a time. When you skip updates, you’re begging for bigger complications. A website maintenance package means you’ve got someone keeping an eye on your updates, and jumping right in to fix any issues that may arise. Skipping updates can also bring some major problems down the road – at some point you’re going to be forced into these updates anyway. At Capacity Marketing, our web team monitors updates, helps integrate your plugins, themes, and other components you’ve added to your site, and helps ensure they’re working properly immediately.

Not only do these missed updates have the potential to impact your site’s useability, but they can impact your sales, too. Being unable to click on a product or finalize a shopping cart purchase is lost profit, and the worse part is you may not even know it’s happening.

Let’s be really honest – in today’s age, if your site isn’t working properly, consumers will find a product similar, with a better user experience.

Site Speed

“Bounce rate increases by 123% if page loading time becomes more than 1 second.”– Think with Google

Site speed is huge, no question about it. A slow loading site will be abandoned by your audience before they can even see what you have to offer. The importance of web maintenance takes this key statistic truly to heart. An inclusive web maintenance package will include audits and reporting. These two services help your web team keep an eye on your site’s performance to nip any problems that arise in the bud before they turn into bigger issues.

To build on this concept, web updates typically include implementations that help your website become even more efficient. Skipping these updates, or ignoring any issues that may arise when putting them to action can hurt more than it helps. With your website being your literal online storefront, it’s crucial to stay on top of these changes. Sometimes that requires the help of a web developer.

But Why do I Need Website Maintenance? What Should I Expect?

If you’ve got your web maintenance handled in-house, more power to ya! We understand that the cost of a web maintenance plan might seem counterintuitive, but hear us out. As your business grows, and you aim to make your website more efficient, more profitable, and you’re ready to deliver an even better user experience, the benefit of hiring someone to keep your website on the up-and-up is huge. Of course, we’d love to help you with your site, so below are a few things you can expect from a web maintenance package with Capacity Marketing.

Routine website updates and security improvements – These usually happen monthly, but sometimes more often!
Updates to existing content – We’re constantly monitoring industry trends, and we’re always staying up to date on the latest SEO best practices. From ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) web compliance, to the latest eCommerce plugins and tools, we’ll recommend ways to not only improve your website’s efficiency, but we’ll always keep an eye out for ways to make your site more appealing to users.
Emergency response – Sometimes emergencies happen. If your site goes down, or someone has hacked you, we’re here to help.
Coding help – We have multiple clients who are completely comfortable going into their site and adding a page, or changing up their own copy – we love to see it! But sometimes, one missed bracket, or an unintentional extra character can break the whole darn thing! A good maintenance package ensures you have someone who can jump in and help fix it!
Reporting and performance monitoring – There are plenty of reasons to keep an eye on just how well (or not) your site is performing. One of the biggest benefits we’ve found happens to be proactive maintenance. By watching the activity on your website on a regular basis, we often pinpoint problems as they start a downward trajectory. This helps us identify a solution before these negative metrics impact your visibility and rankings in search engine results.

Whether you’re ready to go all-in, or you just need a little help getting your site up to speed, we can help get you started. Give us a call at 845-430-5277 and ask how we can help. Want to get updates on what’s happening with the Capacity Team? Head to our contact page here, and sign up at the bottom for our newsletter. Let us help elevate your site’s visibility, and propel you to even greater success!