Website maintenance has never been the most crucial part when it comes to website creation and web development. Whenever a timeline is set up to have a web design and development plan, web maintenance is highly deprioritize and only came to realization by business when there’s portion or areas that is causing a bug or requires maintenance whenever a website breakdown. Website that are built including ecommerce website requires maintenance services to keep it up and running throughout.
We’ve determined a few factors for organization considerations and how often should you require to engage in website maintenance. Breaking down into range of task and estimated routine updates to more extensive improvements that requires more complex time for updates.
Determine web maintenance requirement:
The extensivity of your website structure
An easy to determine factor would be the size of your website which impacts the duration time and costs required. A ecommerce website or heavy website with multiple integrations and pages would therefore require a longer servicing period. As all websites are structured differently, we are unable to apply the same timeframe and concept of maintaining a website across the board.
Website Type (Informative, E-commerce)
Apart from the size and pages of website, another important factor that affects your website maintenance frequency and update timing would be the type of websites being used. Hobby, informative or simple website including personal blogs would be rather easy to maintain compared to an E-commerce website. E-Commerce are highly interactive and dynamics, with various processes and checkpoints involved. This would require more delicate time spent to fix and processes breakdown or touchpoint not reacting well within a website.
Plug-in Debugging and Update
Another key pointer to be aware of would be the updates of key plugins or even themes. Depending on how a website is built up and created. Website plug-ins are key functions to some of the website design you’ve seen on the front end. These functions require it to be updated as some codes are easily depreciated or cause a conflict whenever there’s an update present. A website maintenance agency needs to be checking into these plug-ins in a timely fashion regularly to rectify any ongoing issues.
Website Speed
Every fraction of a second counts in a website. As shown on statistic, if your website takes more than an average of 3 seconds to load. It would shy off most visitor and it is even more crucial due to the fact that SEO is considering a portion of website loading speed to be part of their ranking metrics as well. Loading speed offers a good first impression to customers and continuously improving web loading is beneficial for your digital footprint growth.
Security and Web Applications Firewall (WAF)
Security is getting crucial when it comes to a website with the increase of scams and spams revolving around the world. Thus, higher protection and security would be viable in all organization. You would not want to end up falling victim to hackers and scammers in the digital space. A website security update should be able to be set up by website design and maintenance agency where they ensure your basic security setup are put in place and preventing any security breach. Any breach of website security would result in a dip in your performance metrics thus compromising your key website functions and affecting your reputation.
Range of website maintenance task based on hours taken:
Routine Website Updates:
Updates include routine checks and management which takes up to probably 3 to 6 hours depending on the structure of the website. Regular updating is like giving your site a vitamin boost to ensure uptime performance and security. Compatible with latest trend and technology in the market. This should be conducted on a monthly basis.
Bug Fixes and Updates:
Bug fixes are also another issue that web developer have identified to be a time-consuming portion due to the heavy nature of debugging and rectifying the issue. The time needed depends on the severity and complexity of the issues. A simple fix might take up to a few hours, however, for more intricate issues would stretch through few hours or even up to a day.
Security Audits:
Keeping your website secure is crucial. A monthly security update and audit would require up to 10 hours or more on performance. As these should be conducted in a close up environment especially on ecommerce site. You would want to take a few hours of your time to safeguard your digital space and ensure all are protected before falling victim to scams.
Content Updates:
Refreshing and keeping your website updated to the latest offering and products are key focus to drive your business forward. Thus, a common update would take up hours of updating and refreshing ranging from 2 hours to about 8 hours depending on the changes and wireframe, or content needed to be edited, refresh, and changed. This would happen on a daily, monthly, or even quarterly. Thus, ensuring you have a drag-and-drop builder might help reduce the hours spent connecting with a website maintenance agency to have these information updated.
Major overhaul:
The biggest bulk of unknown variable would be a major overhaul of your current existing website. Depending on the scale and complexity of change request needed. We would always give this a 1 to 2 days work or even more, depending on the request needed. It may also end up in weeks of changes as functions and debugging are involved.
In a nutshell, website maintenance is an ongoing process that requires regular attention. Allocate time based on the specific needs of your site. Consistent and proactive maintenance not only keeps things running smoothly but also contributes to the long-term success of your online presence.
Website Maintenance Service Based on Frequency
An ideal website should technically cover these task such as checking of all pages to ensure front end is running optimally, backing up of past website in case of any significant issue that requires a restoration, frequent updates to core website and plugins with latest features and security protocols in place. Delete of unused spams and comments or not required tools to minimize security risk, checking into form submission if these are working correctly without and issue, running through a quick 404 or 403 code error and ensure all pages are live without and broken links which affect SEO rankings, update of existing content, blogs and also images to keep it fresh and updated.
Website maintenance on a monthly frequency:
Website maintenance company should cover these actions monthly:
- In depth check on the loading speed of your website pages. Flag out things that are slowing a website down.
- Improved cache data and removing unused transient that’s stored in your website should improve your website overall speed.
- Run an in-depth security scan on your website to find out any possible security breach and flag out any usual activity and remediation action towards it.
- Run through the past statistic on your website.
- Ensure there’s no broken links and reconnect any broken links or canonical links, ensuring traffic are driving across your website.
Website maintenance company should cover these actions quarterly:
- Review your current website wireframe and explore new area or areas of improvement.
- Consider getting a revamp if changes require ample time and get an easy to change website in future such as a drag and drop function
- Test every form on your website and pop up on your website. As these are your leads generating tool, ensure it does not crash.
- Upgrade your images to be running on AVIF file format or WEBP format to reduce your loading bandwidth on client end.
- Test your website on all kinds of devices and popular browsers to see if everything displays correctly as planned.
- Improve your SEO ranking with proper meta titles and description that are still effective in the market.
- Thoroughly review your workload. This helps you find out if there are some processes that you can automate.
Website maintenance company should cover these actions yearly:
- Ensure your website is up to date such as the year, it should reflect on the right year.
- Review each page and ensure there are no additional portion or error in wording, resolves them quickly.
- Ensure your domain, hosting are renew and not missed out to have a down site. These would affect your SEO if left un-noticed for a long period of time.
- Ensure your website design are updated and website code is following the latest practice.
- Check if your hosting and email are within a single ecosystem, delete unnecessary email and ensure enough disk space and IO processes for your website to be running optimally.
- Review the top-performing blog post articles on your website and replicate this process or update with a new page with different content to boost your new page deploying the same strategy.
Why regular maintenance is important?
Business startups or MNC often overlooked such processes and only realized the importance whenever there is an error coming up. Engaging a website maintenance company would be able to off load your burden and allowing your agency to pin point areas of improvement within your website that is often neglected. As website is vital for organization, these should be strongly looked upon to ensure websites are up to date and adhering with latest SEO methodology if digital footprint is an avenue to generate leads.