In today’s fast-paced marketplace, having a website has become more of a necessity than a luxury. A website showcases a business to potential customers and is the backbone of a brand’s presence online. However, like a machine with many moving parts, a website requires regular maintenance for optimum performance and security.

Here’s why it’s essential to ensure that your clients regularly maintain their sites to get the most out of their site’s functionality and design features.

1. Seamless User Experience

Keeping a website fresh and free of errors is critical for a positive user experience. Websites are becoming increasingly complex, and user expectations are increasing. Keeping a website up-to-date will help your clients keep their users engaged and happy. The latter is critical for customer visits and positive word-of-mouth recommendations.

Posting new, trending content and updating products regularly will keep your clients’ brands in the limelight, and their website visitors will always be curious about something new. An excellent example of something like this is Mashable: they are well known for posting informative content regularly, and as a result, they have over 10 million monthly visitors (according to Ubersuggest). If your clients are looking for ways to turn visitors into loyal customers, regular website maintenance is an essential factor to consider!

2. Maintain Customer Confidence And Trust

Since website design is often one of the first impressions, customers have for any business, having a poorly maintained website can damage your client’s reputation. An optimized site also enhances customer experience and generates more traffic. A well-maintained website can serve as a visual representation of your client’s company values, and it’s a great canvas to position their brand in front of potential customers. You can also use uptime monitoring tools to track website crashes and ensure that your client’s website is accessible to visitors at all times.

3. Decreased Risk of Errors

When your client builds a new website, it’s common to initially have at least a few errors on their site. Common mistakes include missing images, broken links, and incomplete information. These types of errors can make their website look unprofessional and sloppy.

With regular maintenance from an experienced web designer or development team such as yourself, your clients can maintain an error-free website and prevent any serious security issues from occurring on their sites.

4. Improved Search Engine Performance

If a website doesn’t receive regular maintenance, it will be less likely to appear at the top of search engine results to the customers looking for a specific product or service. When your client’s website is listed on page two or further in a search result, it can mean visitors don’t find their business at all — which translates into lost sales.

The bottom line: advise your clients to avoid ignoring minor problems with their website, as this could lead to significant financial losses.

Maintaining a blog is a great way to stay in touch with customers, and regularly posting new content shows Google that your client’s site has relevant information to share. It also leads to more visitors and more potential customers. Blogs can help your clients improve traffic and visitor engagement.

5. Strengthen Online Reputation

An effective SEO strategy is crucial to growing your clients’ websites and businesses. Additionally, if your clients invest in good content regularly and do not let it languish, this will ensure that their sites are continually optimized for search engines.

For example, suppose you advise your client to regularly post new articles about relevant content in their niche and update the old ones. In that case, the site’s content will contain up-to-date, relevant facts when customers perform searches related to those topics. You may also want to recommend incorporating different types of content like blogs, videos, and infographics; share those on social media platforms to keep visitors engaged.

6. Improved Website Speed

Nobody likes waiting for a website to load. Even if your client has some stellar information or products on their site, slow page-load times can make visitors abandon their cart before it’s even loaded. To speed up their site, it is vital to identify what issues are causing it to slow down.

Many factors affect website performance, including file size, web server response time, database queries per second, total requests made per second, and more. Thankfully, you can do plenty of things to optimize performance, such as reducing image sizes, minifying scripts, and combining CSS files. This ongoing process is a vital part of your clients’ maintenance.

By optimizing their site, including keeping the software installation up-to-date and cleaning out images and media files, your clients’ can ensure that users access their website quickly. Conversely, slow websites can make your clients look unprofessional and cost them money in terms of lost conversions.

7. Increased Website Security

Maintaining websites regularly helps keep security vulnerabilities at bay, protecting sites from possible hacking attempts and unauthorized access.

Most clients find it hard to dedicate time and resources to perform regular maintenance on their websites. It is crucial to make them realize the importance of routine maintenance to ensure optimum website security.

These tips can help your clients protect their websites:

• Set strong passwords — change them frequently — use different passwords for every platform;
• Update software to stay current with the latest features — check for updates weekly or monthly;
• Check all the pages and functionalities and patch open holes or update any old plugins.

Conclusion

Website maintenance is integral to keeping websites running smoothly and looking great. Protecting your clients’ websites from security risks is essential to ensure that their visitors have a positive experience when they visit their site.

If your clients are not currently performing regular website maintenance, we highly recommend that you convince them to start as soon as possible. Not only will it help keep their website looking great, but it will also help you ensure that their site is functioning correctly and securely. Have your clients been neglecting their website in terms of ongoing maintenance? If so, now is the time to correct that mistake and help them get started on a regular maintenance schedule.

Featured image via Unsplash.