3 Reasons To Keep Your Website Up To Date
Website maintenance may not be the most exciting or glamorous aspect of web development, but it is critical to the health and performance of your site. Routinely updating your website ensures that it is continuously showcasing the best parts of your business and keeping you and your users safe.
1. Protect your site from malware and hackers
The web is always changing. If you aren’t keeping your site updated, you’re at risk of the website breaking or getting hacked.
The main way that programmers infiltrate websites is through openings in outdated security software. As new patches are created, these hackers will specifically target websites that are missing these security features. This leaves visitors to your site susceptible to malware, and your site open to viruses that can cause it to go down completely.
Additionally, without site protection, your SEO efforts will be unproductive. Your site’s Google search rankings will go down because of lapsed SSL certificates, and sites that have reported malware issues are delisted until they are fixed.
2. Provide a great customer experience
A website is often a potential customer’s first experience with a business or organization. Having a site with outdated content, a theme that doesn’t display properly, or broken links is not a good look.
Updating your software, plug-ins, and themes in WordPress will make sure that visitors have a positive experience when they navigate your site. Slow-loading sites are frustrating to everyone, and it’s a surefire way to send a visitor to another site. Maintaining your site ensures that it loads quickly, has functioning navigation tools, and that all the information your visitors are looking for is accessible.
In addition to the overall look and functionality, it’s also important to keep in mind the other ways people use your site. More and more people are utilizing accessibility tools to help them navigate websites. Keeping your site maintained and appropriately updated ensures that people using tools like screen readers are able to navigate your site and use all of its features.
3. Make sure that the website displays correctly
The internet changes and adapts based on the way people use it. Your website should be adapting to keep up with the changing needs of users. More people than ever are using mobile devices for their web browsing. Updates to your theme and plugins are key to mobile optimization. Staying on top of site maintenance is critical to ensuring that your site looks sharp no matter where it’s being viewed from.
Coding languages change over time, and this can cause disruption to your site when it’s not routinely updated. If your theme is using an older version of HTML, it will negatively impact how your site looks on the front end. Code often changes and becomes obsolete. Therefore, there’s no way to guarantee that a browser will read your code correctly, and your site may not appear as it was originally designed.
Website maintenance that protects your clients, your business, and your brand.
We are now offering website maintenance! Our team will keep your website up-to-date so that it runs quickly, stays safe, and looks great. We work diligently to help you avoid costly repairs, excessive downtime, or the need to completely rebuild your site should it become infected.
- Weekly backups of your entire website
- Continuous updates of WordPress plug-ins and themes
- Restoration services if your site goes down
