You’ve finally got a website up and running. Congratulations! You may even have learned, on your own, how to make changes to text or images, add new pages or add features like contact forms or social media icons. But adding content and features to a website isn’t the same as maintaining a website. Website maintenance plans are regular duties you, or an agency you pay, perform to ensure your site is secure, high quality, and user-friendly. Here are the key differences between adding content to a website and maintaining a website.
Website Maintenance Plans Focus on Security
Researchers have found that 30,000 websites are hacked every day. When a website is hacked, that means someone steals information about your customers and publishes it on the dark web. This information can include credit card information, debit card numbers, and passwords (which people often use for multiple websites). Once criminals buy this information, they use your customer’s information to make large purchases or make small purchases or withdrawals, hoping the person doesn’t notice.
Hackers often crack into websites that use WordPress content management systems or were created using Wix. Because WordPress and Wix are so easy to use, companies often design beautiful sites with them. But then they don’t take active steps to ensure their customer’s information is secure.
If you must tell your customers their information has been compromised, or if a customer realizes their information has been stolen through your website, that can seriously impact your bottom line. Why would they continue to trust an unsafe company? That’s why paying a professional third party, like SEO Design Chicago, to maintain the security of your website is so important.
Website Maintenance Plans Improve the Usability of Your Site
When you use a pre-designed theme from WordPress, Wix, Shopify, Squarespace, or other website builders, they’re usually pretty good-looking. But just because you like a particular design doesn’t mean your customers necessarily find the website usable. Website usability is the art and science of figuring out how easy or hard a website is to use.
Experienced web developers know how to conduct user tests or analyze data reports to answer the following questions about your website:
- How easy is it for a first-time user to accomplish a specific goal, like making a purchase, inquiring for more information, or finding important pages on your website?
- How long does it take for people to perform one of the above tasks?
- What do people remember about your company and website after they’re done looking at it?
- How many mistakes do people make when trying to accomplish one of the above goals?
- How appealing do people find your website?
These are difficult questions to answer unless you have years of experience. That’s why it’s often beneficial to let experts, like SEO Design Chicago, draw conclusions about your website’s usability.
Website Maintenance Plans Help You Make Decisions About the Future
You don’t want to keep repeating the same mistakes over and over, do you? Often, with DIY website design tools, owners fall into the trap of adding new content that’s just like the old content.
Part of a good website maintenance plan is taking data from the past to make decisions about future website content. For example, you should regularly check reports indicating how well, or poorly, your site is doing when it comes to search engine optimization, or SEO.
Website experts know how to improve where your site ranks in Google’s search engine results. They also know the words people use to find your site through Google. Finally, they suggest ways to change your content in the future, or redesign existing content, so that your website ranks higher.
At SEO Design Chicago, we can make these changes for you, create future content for you, or simply offer suggestions. Whatever your needs are, we’ll find a way to ensure you have a website maintenance plan that properly addresses important issues such as security, usability, and SEO.
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