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Without regular maintenance, websites become hard to navigate, slow to load, and full of broken links – or in other words, a nightmare to use!
Website maintenance tasks, such as frequent updates, regular security scans, content refreshes, and design tweaks, ensure your website is high-performing, secure, and quick (and convinces visitors to stick around and become customers).
So, let’s explore the importance of website maintenance in detail – as well as discover why hiring a professional website maintenance service is incredibly cost- and time-effective.
Why Is Website Maintenance Important? 11 Reasons To Consider
Without maintenance, your website will lose traffic and revenue, and you risk damaging your reputation in the long run.
Leaving a website to its own devices means it’s not getting security patches and you’re not paying attention to what your visitors want. Research shows that over two-thirds of businesses lose revenue because of low-performing websites… ouch!
On the other hand, with a regular website maintenance plan (and checklist), you’re:
- Keeping your site secure
- Boosting performance
- Improving user experience (UX)
- Increasing lead generation and sales
- Improving search engine optimization (SEO) rankings
- Keeping your site fresh with new content
- Upholding your brand image and reputation
- Boosting cost efficiency
- Finding peace of mind
- Helping your site to compete better
- Ensuring compliance
1. Keeping your site secure
Research shows that four in ten hacked or infected websites have outdated content or outdated software, and almost half are vulnerable to security breaches.
This means you must be vigilant, keeping your site updated and secured.
A poorly secured site is easy prey for malicious attacks that leak sensitive data, crash and lock sites down, and compromise your visitors’ data and devices.
Meanwhile, a well-maintained and updated website uses an up-to-date SSL security certificate to encrypt site data, has a premium security plugin with a firewall (like Sucuri), and processes payments through secure gateways. Well-maintained websites also experience minimal downtime.
2. Boosting performance
A website with slow loading times, security warnings, and outdated, glitchy plugins loses interest fast. For example, the chances of your visitors leaving your site increase by 123% as your load time goes up from one to ten seconds.
Boosting your website’s performance consists of optimizing page load speeds, checking internal links work, removing broken links, ensuring it’s mobile responsive, and checking that your web host can handle your level of traffic.
Lead Liberated is a great example of a high performer. StateWP maintains this nonprofit’s site to help it load efficiently on all devices, as you can see through its GTMetrix speed test results:
3. Improving user experience (UX)
If people have a positive user experience, they’re more likely to return.
It’s one reason why paying attention to design features, menu functionality, forms, and ease of use is so important. Poor customer experience results in a frustrating site that’s hard to navigate and get information from.
For instance, if you run an e-commerce site, you should avoid burying essential details, such as shipping rates, in a hard-to-find page. Over a fifth of e-commerce shoppers abandon their carts because of poor experiences.
Instead, keep your design uncluttered, menus accessible, links obvious, and the hierarchy of your content logical for humans and bots (coming from both search engines and AI tools).
Tangram Insurance’s website offers a fantastic experience. From the front page, it’s easy to spot all the menus and find the information you’re looking for:
4. Increasing lead generation and sales
Regardless of your industry, a well-maintained website always boosts your chances of converting visitors into potential customers.
The best way to achieve this goal is through the use of product- or geographic-specific landing pages.
They are designed to attract visitors from search engines, online adverts, or physical adverts, and to encourage sales by gently nudging them closer to a sale. Research shows that the best landing pages can convert an average of 2.35% of visitors.
Maintaining these landing pages regularly helps you fine-tune their design and content, improve conversion rates through A/B testing and optimization, and ultimately catch prospective buyers’ attention and turn them into customers.
Look at an example for our site for inspiration and guidance:
5. Improving search engine optimization (SEO) rankings
SEO maintenance is important because it helps your website get seen in your target audience’s search results. Think of the first page of Google for your most relevant keywords (i.e., “lawyer in San Jose”).
SEO is a long-term process that can take several months of maintenance to start paying off because search engines need time to evaluate new content and update their rankings.
A key aspect of SEO is developing what Google calls “helpful” content that’s insightful and relevant to searchers. You can achieve this by publishing several articles and pages each month as part of your maintenance activities, targeting specific questions and doubts your clients have.
Another fundamental aspect is technical SEO, which in layman’s terms refers to setting up your website to be extremely easy to navigate for search engines. This way they can easily find what they’re looking for and recommend you to their users. Having clear internal links, descriptive URLs, meta tags, and informative schema markups are all part of good technical SEO practices.
6. Keeping your site fresh with new content
Regularly updating your content keeps potential customers up to speed on your latest products and services and shows visitors you’re an authority in your field.
As a result, you’re more likely to be noticed by other websites, which leads to new backlinks to your site, brand-new traffic streams, and more authority in your niche.
Sites without regular content updates grow stale and look careless. For example, if you haven’t added new testimonials or blog posts for over a year, visitors (and Google) might assume you’ve left your site to rot. Without fresh content, you’ll fall down search rankings, and people won’t find you.
A well-maintained website typically publishes relevant content multiple times a month and keeps a regularly updated resource center (or knowledge base).
7. Upholding your brand image and reputation
Your website is like a business card – it establishes your brand and credibility. It’s also a portfolio that shows visitors what makes you unique and why you’re worth their time and money.
Therefore, your website should always offer plenty of social proof (case studies, testimonials, customer videos), accurate contact information, and support services, like live chat.
A poorly maintained website looks unprofessional and careless. Showing you care about customers and your business means taking the time to ensure your site offers accurate, engaging information and testimonials that people can easily verify.
8. Boosting cost efficiency
After launching a new website, regular maintenance is the only way to protect your investment and make sure it’s doing its job to bring in visitors and build sales, giving you consistently strong returns.
Think of it as insurance or maintenance for your car.
It’s cheaper to maintain your site regularly than to pay to repair it or to lose business due to downtime, data loss, or reputational damage.
If you don’t maintain your site regularly after launch, its value will decrease gradually and steadily as visitor needs change. It’ll lose visitors, clicks, and sales.
Beyond that, your site will develop errors and be at greater risk of hacking, potentially leading to a serious drop in reputation.
To boost your cost efficiency, follow Morris & Garritano’s example. This insurance firm reached out to StateWP to manage its website and content to save time and money and outsource the security risks to a partner that can handle them.
Once we started working together, the firm discovered it could save even more money by changing its maintenance package with us! By moving from a Starter to a Premium plan, the client receives more support – 2 hours of developer time per month – on a better-value package.
9. Finding peace of mind
It’s tempting to avoid maintenance if you’re busy managing your business. But there’s always the worry that your site will get hacked or lose revenue if you ignore it.
These worries are completely valid. Even missing regular updates can cause your site to develop errors and fall prey to attackers (and the pain can compound quickly if you also forgot to take regular backups of your site).
Setting up a maintenance plan will keep your site running smoothly, allowing you to concentrate on your core business activities.
The most efficient way to find peace of mind is to hire a maintenance agency and delegate your website’s crucial tasks to a team of experts.
Lamano Law is just one client enjoying complete peace of mind with our regular maintenance plans. The law firm is a Premium customer that benefits from monthly website edits, security plugin updates, performance boosts, downtime monitoring, and content auditing.
“The StateWP team gets to our requests really fast and with everything in one place, it makes management and communication simple. StateWP keeps our WordPress sites secure and performing great and we can rely on them for anything WordPress related.”
– Givelle Lamano, Lamano Law
10. Helping your site to compete better
Regular maintenance ensures your website positions your brand as the best in your field, whether that’s on quality service, the uniqueness of your selling points, or your expertise.
Without regular site care, your rivals can overtake you by reacting faster to new industry trends and technologies. They can nimbly launch new services, adjust their message and brand, and tempt your customers.
A great example of site maintenance increasing competitiveness is our work with Sun Pacific, an industry leader in citrus fruit supply. With our maintenance services, the brand found it easier to refresh its marketing and outreach toward Gen Z customers – something that wasn’t possible with its previously sluggish websites.
The benefits don’t end there for Sun Pacific, either, as we’ll explore below.
11. Ensuring compliance
Routine maintenance ensures your website meets legal requirements related to industry and data protection.
You likely need to comply with:
- The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which ensure web content is accessible to people of all abilities
- The Americans with Disabilities Act (AGA), which protects the rights of disabled people online and offline
- The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which safeguards the data rights of website visitors from the European Union
Without regular maintenance, your website can become outdated or inaccessible, breaking recently launched regulations. For example, in the event of GDPR non-compliance, you could face a maximum fine of €20 million.
To avoid these penalties, you should regularly maintain your site to keep it accessible and ensure visitors know who to contact if they have concerns.
Costero Brokers offers a great example of a compliant, well-maintained website. It has a clear, regularly updated GDPR policy that informs visitors of their rights and what data the site processes. It also offers an accessibility widget, helping to support visitors with specific needs:
The Next Step: Maintain and Protect Your Site (With StateWP, your Friendly Expert)
If you want your website to thrive and for leads and revenue to flow, you need to:
- Maintain it regularly
- Have a maintenance plan in place as soon as your site goes live
The most time-effective and cost-efficient way is to partner with a team of experts who can handle all the tasks for you behind the scenes.
If you’re already running an established business and don’t have maintenance, don’t worry. A partner like StateWP (that’s us!) can get you up to speed quickly with software updates, checks, and improvements.
Even if a previous partner has kept you in the dark about some problems, we can still take over, run our audits and optimizations, and give you complete peace of mind.
We can take charge of:
- Editing your content
- Testing your site for mobile devices
- Running security updates and protecting your content
- Monitoring site traffic
- Protecting you in the event of hacks and errors
- Boosting and maintaining speed and performance
For business owners on our Elite plans, we also run SEO audits and test new features on staging sites, ensuring you never, ever have maintenance downtime to think about.
No commitment is required immediately, regardless of the plan. Even if you simply want to audit your site health, we have free tools to help.
Let’s look again at Sun Pacific, one of our longest-standing clients. Before approaching StateWP, the brand struggled to manage its website security and had performance issues.
“The websites were slow, outdated, and there was malware everywhere. The worst part was that we didn’t even know who was controlling them – we didn’t even know they were on WordPress. It was like we needed someone to hack into the websites to figure everything out – we were just praying our way through!”
– Emma Wollenweber, Marketing Manager at Sun Pacific
By moving its web content over to StateWP for maintenance support, however, the firm now benefits from:
- Boosted site performance (an increase from a C to an A grade in GTMetrix testing)
- Regular content updates
- Design and layout editing and optimization
- Custom policy generation (a perk included in Elite plans)
Sun Pacific also trusts us to maintain two additional sites for its child brands as part of a rebate package. Wollenweber is thrilled with the partnership:
“We got so much out of just paying StateWP to answer all our questions and solve these problems. Just the ability to communicate with the person managing our website is HUGE. My strength as a marketer is having the audacity to ask what’s going on, and StateWP enables me to do that.”
We really can’t overstate WordPress maintenance importance. Maintaining your website elevates your brand, keeps revenue flowing, and ensures customers get the best possible user experience.
To discover how StateWP can help manage your website, speak to Garrett for a free demo.
Nothing beats a live demonstration to grasp the importance of WordPress maintenance.
Importance of Website Maintenance: FAQs
Let’s take one last look at some common questions about regular website maintenance and the importance of regular checkups.
Why is it important for an organization to maintain its website?
Who is responsible for maintaining a website?
These providers keep websites running smoothly while owners attend to other business matters without fearing loss of traffic or costly security issues.
What happens if you don't maintain your website?
What does it mean when a website is under maintenance?
Why should you update your website regularly?
How much does website maintenance cost?
For small to medium business owners, website maintenance costs between $99 and $630 per month, though additional costs may apply depending on your maintenance schedule and needs. For example, the size of your website, the number of regular visitors you welcome, and the features and functionality you need can affect the price you pay.