In order for a website to be successful, it is important for the website owner to maintain it. However, website maintenance can be time consuming and expensive. Outsourcing website maintenance can help your website grow by freeing up time for the owner to focus on other aspects of the business and by providing experienced professionals who can maintain the website properly. The post below will help you know reasons why outsourcing website brings benefits.
The greatest challenge lies in telling people about your website maintenance services and proving your mettle in the market. Congratulations, you have cleared the first hurdle by creating a website. Now you can sit back and reap the rewards.
Wrong, creating a website is only the beginning. What is the purpose of website maintenance? Website maintenance is crucial because you want your website to function optimally, ensure its security & enhance user experience while experiencing a steady increase in traffic, visitors etc.
- A one-second delay in page loading can reduce page views by 11%
- Even a 0.1% increase in loading time on mobile devices can boost conversions by 8.4%
Your IT team should conduct weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly website checks to ensure the smooth functioning of your website.
Many business owners may not have the resources at this time to conduct regular web maintenance checks. In such scenarios, they can outsource the task to agencies or web management companies. This blog will discuss how outsourcing your web maintenance can improve website growth.
Why Website Maintenance is Need of the Hour
Anything with an internet connection is vulnerable, it’s known to all. Still many of us pay no heed to protect or securing our website from hackers. There could be two main reasons why we pay no serious attention to websites;
- First, we believe the website has nothing precious that could be stolen
- Second, we are confident that it will never get hacked
Frankly, we are wrong in both cases. Even if you have a static website, you have very important data to protect. It could be the data you collect from customers or your business strategies. If you are not taking even basic steps to guard your website, then the identity of your customers and readers is at serious risk.
Here are some alarming cybercrime stats and facts for those ignoring website security;
As per Statista,
- 1473 data breaches reported in the USA alone in 2019
- Hackers exposed 164.68 million Sensitive records online in the same year
So, the data given here testify that you need to protect your website. But, to run a successful business you need to ensure you have a team who maintains your website regularly. If you don’t, you can hire a team or outsource website maintenance. We have introduced the benefits of outsourcing website maintenance in this article, but first,
let’s explore why website maintenance is the need of the hour?
Excellent User experience
With efficient website maintenance services, your website will perform well. A pleasant user experience will attract customers and encourage them to return. Apart from the reduced loading time and bounce rate, the website’s visibility will also improve.
Did you know 53% of visitors won’t revisit your website if they experience sluggish performance or your website load time 3 seconds slow?
Apart from this, there are various other factors that enhance user experience, for example;
Usefulness: Why does someone visit your website?
Findable: Is your website easily findable across channels?
Credible: Do users find reliable resources, services or products?
Desirable: Is the content on your website desirable?
Accessible: is your content easily accessible across all devices.
Valuable: Are you providing users valuable content that they fid it worth visiting.
If you have a website, it is important to keep your website updated from time to time. This is not just important for keeping your users updated with the new content but also important from an SEO perspective. For example, SEO optimization is required to keep up with the search trends. Hence, it will help you two ways: keep your website content interesting and fresh for users to find something new every time they login to your website. Besides, it is also crucial to achieve higher rank in the search engines to improve visibility. When it comes to online businesses, no users means no business.
Reduce Downtime and Increase Profits
A website is a lifeline for many businesses, especially eCommerce. If their website crashes or slows down, they face a loss of revenue and reputation. As per research conducted by Shopping Cart Elite, a 6-hour outage can result in a 30% drop in rankings. The damage could last for 2 months. Losses due to downtime can be $5,600/min to $300,000/hour in web application downtime.
Even if you possess basic knowledge, fixing website errors, running updates, and handling security concerns can eat up a major chunk of your time. Hence, if you hire web development companies to handle web maintenance services for you, they can do it faster and reduce downtime.
Keep in mind that your product pages carry more importance than the homepage and other links. If customers experience slow loading times or are redirected to other pages, they will never deal with you.
Quick Turnaround for New Products and Services
Usually, when a business launch any new products, announces any services, or reviews something, you need to spread this in the market with greater speed. And, your website is the Centrepoint to spread it. For example, whenever any such event occurs, your team will list those products, services, or reviews with their benefits, features, and offers quickly on the website. Listing products and services will ensure you have a competitive edge against your competitors. But, to have these benefits, you need to have regular website maintenance.
Adaption with New Technology and Compatibility
When you have a team to maintain your website, they ensure your website is updated with new themes and plugins. This ensures not just the robust protection of your website, but also ensures compatibility with tech advent. We see that new technologies are being rolled out every now and then. And, businesses need to adopt the latest technology and implement them into their business to ensure the website accessible by all users across all devices. To adopt the new technology, you need to ensure your website is compatible with the latest tech advent. That means regular maintenance is needed.
Proper Monitoring and Tracking
How do you know your website is accessible to users? The answer is “with daily website traffic analysis. What if you don’t do this? You will never know if your website is accessible to users or not. Hence, it will not in line with your business goals. You need to ensure your website is maintained and you get website performance reporting on a regular basis to ensure it is aligned with your goals.
Reasons How Outsourcing Website Maintenance can Boost Website Growth
Website maintenance is the subsequent part and most business owners do not pay much attention to it. Besides, when you outsource web design and development, you might get free website maintenance for a certain period of time by the tech partner. But, they do not offer maintenance services for a lifetime. As a result, most startups do not think about website maintenance deeply unless any issue occurs. Conducting a serious website check involves the following activities:
- Review search console
- Check for broken links
- Update your CMS and plugins
- Review analysis
- Website Performance Analysis
- Testing website forms
- Test order process
- Backups
- Security
- Update your content
Let’s discuss the benefits of outsourcing website maintenance.
Website maintenance can be time-consuming, especially for startups and large corporations. Small businesses and startups are usually busy with sales, marketing, and employee training so they may not have time for website maintenance. On the other hand, large enterprises have a lot on their plate so finding time for website maintenance can be hard.
When you hire a website maintenance company, they understand your requirements and work as per a website maintenance plan. They have been doing it for so long that they know when, how, and how frequently to conduct website maintenance. Rather than spending endless hours on coding and fixing errors, you can focus on business development. Over time, you can learn the tricks of the trade from these guys and hire an IT team to handle web maintenance.
Cost-effective
Hiring a web maintenance company is a good option if you do not have employees to manage the same. Depending on your requirements and budget, you can hire a reputed agency/company to conduct maintenance. Forming an IT team can be a daunting task and it will incur a huge website maintenance cost, not to mention the time and energy required to hire employees.
Now, many of you might want to know how much web maintenance costs. The average maintenance cost will be significantly less than the website development cost. However, for a medium-sized website is approximately $100 to $500 a month. For large, complex websites, the cost can shoot up to $200 or more a year.
Robust Security
In today’s times, data is money. Companies must protect their data because data loss can lead to considerable losses. As per IBM, it takes 287 days for a company to detect a data breach. More than 40-60 percent of businesses can’t resume operations after data loss. Furthermore, the average cost of a data breach for large corporations has shot up to $3.92 billion after a data breach.
We do not intend to scare you with these statistics but it is just to emphasize the point that you cannot underestimate the importance of data security. Note that eCommerce companies are at the highest risk of being hacked. Loss of data also leads to loss of reputation for the company while customer information like credit/debit card details & contact details might be leaked on the internet.
Once customers lose their trust in you, they will not return again. Professional web maintenance companies know what to do. They will implement the right security strategies, fix loopholes and bugs to prevent such issues. Even if security problems arise, they will try to minimize the damage.
Advanced Tools
Web maintenance service providers have access to the latest tools and technologies to optimize your website. Count on them to run the latest updates or even uninstall outdated software. Cleaning up unnecessary elements and retaining useful ones will further boost the effectiveness of your website.
Useful Backups
Most companies forget about creating backups in case things go south. They only wake up when the damage is done. Professional web management service providers are taking proactive steps to control such damage. They take website backups regularly so that your website can go live fast even after a total crash.
It is not uncommon for many website maintenance service professionals to backup the website every hour. So, you will have the latest website version with all the latest information related to clients/customers and sensitive information.
Key Takeaways
Outsourced web maintenance has plenty of advantages but some cons as well. Sometimes, service quality, accountability, and communication can be a cause for concern. However, it is advisable to check the service provider’s credits, and experience while reading testimonials of satisfied clients. If the web maintenance service provider has strict quality parameters and a team of dedicated employees, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
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This content was originally published here.
