Why You Need Ongoing Website Maintenance [5 Reasons, How to Get Started]

Is your website struggling with errors, slow-loading pages, and security issues? If so, it needs some serious TLC (tender loving care).

Without regular maintenance and updates, these problems keep coming back – unlike your customers, who may have given up out of frustration.

Ongoing website maintenance is the key to keeping things safe, optimized, and accessible.

Below, we explore five reasons you need to update, optimize, and audit your site regularly – and how we can help.

What Is Ongoing Website Maintenance?

Ongoing website maintenance includes all the tasks required to keep sites secure, functional, and running at their best. Regular maintenance tasks include:

• Updating outdated plugins, themes, and core files
• Editing your content so it’s relevant and up-to-date
• Fixing broken links and redirections
• Performing security scans for malware
• Adding and updating keywords for search engine algorithms and optimization
• Updating your SSL certificate to encrypt data
• Improving page load times
• Boosting your site’s mobile responsiveness

Why Does a Website Need Ongoing Maintenance?

Your website’s security, performance, and functionality deteriorate without regular maintenance.

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If your site isn’t trustworthy, fast, easy to use, and packed with relevant information, your visitors will look elsewhere.

Without maintenance, small potential issues – such as broken links, security vulnerabilities, and missing updates – snowball into bigger problems over time. This situation can escalate to having to deal with major security breaches, compliance fines, and rebuilding everything from scratch.

As you know, fines and a full rebuild aren’t cheap, so an ongoing maintenance process makes financial sense in the long run.

The 5 Reasons Ongoing Website Maintenance Protects Your Investment and Saves You Money Long-Term

Investing in ongoing website management protects the time and money you put into it. Maintenance also gradually improves the functionality of your website, helping you improve your digital presence, add new services (i.e., a client portal), and grow your customer base.

Ongoing maintenance services:

• Secure your site by protecting against threats that harm your reputation
• Optimize your page load speeds and performance to keep visitors engaged
• Ensure your site is easy to navigate and use on all devices
• Develop functions and features in line with current trends and expectations
• Rank highly in relevant search results to passively attract visitors

Let’s dig deeper into each of these points.

1. Security

Hackers love outdated websites because they’re easy to exploit. Ignoring your website’s maintenance only makes it weaker against malicious attacks.

For example, don’t pass over plugin patches that eliminate vulnerabilities in your website’s code and protect it from threats. According to a Sucuri study, over 39% of all hacked websites run on outdated software. The less secure your website is, the more likely it is to develop errors and leak data.

On the other hand, regularly updating your core files, themes, and plugins enhances your site’s security. Likewise, scanning your site for malware, updating your SSL certificate to encrypt data, and maintaining a firewall protect your site.

Keeping on top of security updates is one reason why CAL Insurance hired us to maintain its website. The insurer needed a reputable maintenance company to take over 24/7 monitoring and roll out regular updates to keep its online presence and customers safe.

With our StateWP’s 100% hack-free record, we harden sites, install security updates as soon as we’ve tested them, and monitor the site for errors and threats around the clock with firewalls.

2. Performance and speed

Your website’s performance deteriorates without regular maintenance. For example, avoiding WordPress core updates can cause your page load speeds to slow down, frustrating visitors.

If your page load speed drops by as little as two seconds, you could lose up to 15% of your mobile visitors.

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Besides a high bounce rate, not taking care of your website could also lead to:

• Server memory limit overloads
• Site and file permission errors that prevent people from accessing pages
• Theme and plugin conflicts

With an ongoing routine website maintenance schedule, your site performs at its best, and you can spot and fix speed issues faster. Your maintenance partner can also offer you tons of performance and speed optimization tricks, such as:

• Caching and compressing your site’s data
• Optimizing images and videos
• Boosting server memory limits
• Auditing and clearing your databases

Some of these tricks can get pretty complex, which is why Bicycle Law relies on StateWP for help.

The legal firm’s site generates tons of leads, so it needs to keep its website performing well to keep visitors engaged. We regularly check its load speeds to maintain peak performance and give the lawyers peace of mind.

3. Design and UX

Top Design Firms claims that around 50% of consumers form an opinion about your brand based on your web design. Their interest vanishes if your website is difficult to use or looks dated.

Without regular website maintenance, issues such as broken links, awkward navigation controls, and faulty forms continue to make the user experience (UX) more frustrating.

You may also not keep up with mobile responsiveness, which means smartphone and tablet users struggle to navigate your site. For instance, they may need to pinch and zoom to read text or find it difficult to tap hyperlinks.

Regularly optimizing your site for mobile users (e.g., using a responsive template) keeps it easy to use on all devices.

Aging and neglected website designs are also an issue. GoodFirms found that navigation scares off 61.5% of visitors, while 38.5% are unimpressed by outdated designs, and 34.6% click away because of poor content structure.

Making regular edits every month saves you money on full website redesign costs further down the line. Additionally, incremental design updates show customers you care about their experience, which builds customer trust.

Sun Pacific, for example, came to StateWP with three websites suffering from a range of UX issues, such as awkward navigation design and poor content structure.

We revamped and made its site design more accessible and continue to maintain accessibility on a regular basis. The internal team doesn’t have to worry about these technical issues coming back!

4. Ongoing functionality improvements

As your business grows, so will your website’s traffic. Besides, your potential customers’ needs evolve as new technologies are introduced and new trends influence your niche.

For example, let’s say you start with a simple, one-page site that links to your social media, where you handle sales directly.

In time, your customer base might grow, so you could benefit from an online store to automate your digital product sales and increase your revenue potential.

You might also need help handling more customer queries – so you could add live chat or a knowledge base to deal with questions and guide more visitors into your sales funnel.

Avoiding functionality upgrades restricts your revenue and could annoy visitors by making their experience seem “outdated” or “not suited for a more mature business.”

To avoid that, our client, Lamano Law, turned to us for functionality tweaks. Using monthly editing hours over the course of a few years, we added a video chatbot, click-to-call buttons, a client portal, and landing pages for each of its covered locations, increasing sales from paid traffic, organic traffic, and local searchers.

5. SEO and content management

Not maintaining your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) means it won’t rank highly in relevant search results or reach new customers with relevant keywords.

Your search engine rankings could be harmed by:

• Missing, low-value, or duplicate content
• Dead-end links or illogical redirections
• Content that’s left unlinked or orphaned pages
• Keyword spamming
• A lack of fresh, regular content
• Poor website vitals

When you ignore SEO performance, people who find websites through non-advertising results (also known as organic search) won’t visit your site. These organic clicks make up more than half of all web traffic, according to BrightEdge.

Google also penalizes sites with “unhelpful” or outdated content, so you must show experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness to rank well.

Thankfully, ongoing maintenance includes plenty of ways to get lost traffic back. Your maintenance provider can improve your Core Web Vitals score and edit your content regularly so it’s relevant, up-to-date, and optimized for trending keywords.

Good maintenance practices, such as fixing broken links, editing image and content tags, submitting sitemaps, and deleting outdated material, result in a more efficient indexation of your content.

Combine these ongoing maintenance tactics with regular, valuable posts to keep content fresh and show people you’re active and invested in what you do. These strategies boost your chances of appearing to the right searchers.

Getting Started With Ongoing Website Management

While you can do all of the above yourself, ongoing website maintenance and creating an excellent user experience take a lot of time, effort, and expertise. It’s estimated that it will take you a bare minimum of 5 hours a month – once you know what you’re doing!

When you delegate these tasks to an experienced agency:

• You save money you’d otherwise waste on training yourself and DIY maintenance
• You always have access to expertise on demand
• You can rest easy knowing your site is cared for while you focus on your core business activities and growing your revenue

Check out our guide to the best website maintenance companies if you’re shopping around. Still, if you ask us, there’s only one choice for WordPress ongoing maintenance… 😉

Ongoing WordPress maintenance with StateWP

Our team has over 15 years of experience working together to keep sites secure, speedy, and ranking highly in search results.

For example, we give Sun Pacific monthly content and layout updates and regular speed optimization to help keep its visitors engaged. Partnering with StateWP has marked a huge turnaround for the brand.

“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.

We got so much out of just paying StateWP to answer all our questions and solve these problems.”

Emma Wollenweber, Marketing Manager at Sun Pacific

Then, there’s Romano Law.

As a leading law firm in California, it needs to protect its sensitive data. StateWP offers this company a dedicated team for software updates and cyber threat scanning and removal.

We also help with the site’s performance improvements, clean up content, manage an ADA accessibility plugin, upgrade features, and deliver analytics reports monthly.

If you want complete peace of mind like Sun Pacific and Romano, check out our two most popular ongoing website support packages, Premium and Elite.

With Premium, you get:

• Mobile site testing and editing
• Speed and performance boosts
• Two hours of site editing per month
• Fractional hour billing
• Data backups and restoration
• Complete software and SSL updates
• Hack remediation support
• Google Analytics setup & integration
• A dedicated account manager

If you pick the complete package with Elite, you get all of the above, plus:

• Thorough SEO auditing
• Extended support for eCommerce and LMS
• Staging site support so you can test feature upgrades without affecting your live site
• A disclosure policies license

If your site could use regular TLC, get in touch with Garrett, and let’s set you up with a cost-effective, hands-off maintenance package.

Ongoing Website Maintenance: FAQs

Let’s close our guide with final thoughts on ongoing maintenance and well-maintained websites.