subject: Why Website Maintenance is So Important [print this page] Why Website Maintenance is So Important Why Website Maintenance is So Important
Your online real estate is just as important to maintain as your engine, good health, or office temperature. After all, any of these left unchecked can create, at the very least, a poor impression of you, and even disaster.
Technologies progress quickly over time, after all; static websites with many clipart graphics were all the rage years ago, but a professional site in this style will just be laughed at these days, even if people see that it was a holdover from earlier days. Using such an outdated website makes you seem old, stale, and uninterested in staying current in a global marketplace.
With regular updates to the technology your website utilizes, you can make your website easier to use, add features that would be useful to your customers or business partners, encourage people to interact through social networking tools, or make it easier to reach customers and let them know about updates to your products or services.
Technology can also break quite easily. If the server that hosts your files suddenly changes its file organization in some way and you're not monitoring the site, you can miss finding out that none of the images on your site will load for months! Similarly, if you're linking to other sites and they are taken down for some reason, you should remove your links to them or seem outdated, like a telephone book that's too old.
You can also regularly examine site traffic statistics to see where your visitors are coming from, what they like the most and least (based on how long they stay on certain pages), what pages they are visiting, and so on. Doing so allows you to maximize your traffic and bring in far more customers than ignoring your statistics.
For that matter, even "natural" search engine traffic that comes from being listed in Google's search results (or the results of another major provider) can drop off suddenly. You need to be aware when this happens so your website doesn't become virtually useless overnight when a search engine updates the algorithm it uses to determine which sites are worth indexing. This can happen because they decide to use meta tags that they previously didn't, or they start putting less emphasis on certain SEO methods that you've been relying upon, for instance.
Finally, the most common-sense reason to update your website is to keep your visitors happy and engaged. If you know a website you are interested in will be updating its content on a regular basis, you'll be more tempted to stop in and see what's new than if it simply never changes. This can attract business that your website wouldn't otherwise generate for you, help you build connections with consumers, and more.
These are just some of the many reasons you need to maintain your website on a regular basis. South Jersey Web Design has a team of technical experts who are capable of performing website maintenance. If you simply don't have the time to do it yourself, you don't have to leave your customers out in the cold!
