Building a website definitely costs a lot – money, time and energy. With this kind of investment, you wouldn’t want all this to go to waste, right?
Maintaining your website properly is the best way to ensure that it is protected from any problems that will cause you to lose all the hard work involved in building it. But maintaining it is not that easy. You need actual experts to take care of it. If you haven’t got a maintenance plan for your website, here are some reasons that might convince you to take the leap:
1. You might accidentally break the website
It’s fun to play around with your website, after all, you’ve spent so much on it. But if you break or delete something, that’s gonna be a problem for you. It will eat up your precious time figuring out what happened and it might take more time trying to resolve it. This is where maintenance packages will be beneficial as you will have someone to pass the problem onto and they will happily resolve it for you.
2. It keeps hack attacks at bay
There are tons of hackers online trying to either steal from you or just wanting to cause trouble to unsuspecting victims. Simply leaving your website and assuming it’ll be ok makes you a prime candidate for these hackers. They trawl the internet with a robot searching for websites that are out of date, then simply ATTACK. Without warning your website is either lost, or now has a ransom on it.
3. Software Updates
The internet is always evolving and so should your website. The core of your website is built on a framework – that framework is updated weekly – sometimes daily. Anytime an update comes up, someone needs to get a backup in place, duplicate the website, test all the new core update and see if the website breaks, test all pages are still responsive, test all forms – then relaunch the website.
Consider how long it would take you to:
A.) Find out there is a major core update
B.) Plan out how you’ll duplicate the website
C.) Source and implement all changes
D.) Test all the changes
E.) Relaunch the website……
What would this time be worth to you?
What if you break it? Then who will you call?
4. Plugin Updates
Your website would be built on a series of plugins. These cost money and are renewed every year. They also expire and need updating almost every month – and if they’re not….. Refer to #2 before you know it you’ll just be the next business that’s been hacked.
5. Is your website actually up?
It’s surprising when we turn on the ‘up-time monitoring’ service how often we find websites are simply down all the time.
We can happily report to our clients that the host they know and trust is actually only performing half of the time.
It’s also a great service when something drastic happens – like a domain name expires – you had no idea – you’re running your business. We simply see the website is down and we spring into action.
6. Your business needs to build a relationship with a web person
When you need an update who are you going to call? Getting someone fresh on the job means – they didn’t build the website – or they’ll charge you to ‘work out’ someone else’s code.
Website are like Kitchens. Only the core developer knows where everything is when you want to quickly whip up a Lemon Meringue Pie, you know where all the pots and pan are, you know the oven and where all the utensils live…. imagine walking into someone else’s kitchen! Everything will take twice the time as you have no idea where the darn sugar is!!
When you build a relationship with someone you can rely on tasks happening smoothly without issue.
7. You can have your website amended anytime
You don’t have to worry about how you will be able to update your content, design or anything at all. You will have someone to rely on whenever you want an update rolled out. These type of costs will either be included in the monthly fee or offered for a fraction of the cost of going to a new developer.
8. You can focus on your business
Every moment you spend updating your website is a moment stolen from your clients and colleagues. You didn’t get into business to update your website. You got into business to do business. So leave your website to a professional.
Summary
A maintenance plan is not an added expense, in fact, it should have part of the budget when you decided to build a website. Having a maintenance plan doesn’t mean your website will be invincible, but if something drastic happens you’ll have a hero on your side.
