Last week, we started our new blog series called Marketing for Geniuses. We know you’re the cream of the crop and the best of the best in your field (just like we know marketing backwards and forwards!).
But you need to know the general nuts and bolts of marketing so that you feel confident in your purchasing decisions (and don’t shoot yourself in the foot by torching your marketing budget).
So, a little reminder: your website is a building, and web design strategy is the process of constructing the building.
But a regular building isn’t just built and voila! No work on it is required ever again.
A building needs a plumber for when the toilets clog. It needs an electrician for when the power goes out. And it needs a superintendent to track ongoing maintenance.
Just like a building, your website needs regular repair as well. This is called website maintenance and security.
Website Maintenance and Security Checklist: Do You Really Want to Devote Your Valuable Time to Mopping the Floor?
When the pipes break, a building floods. Similarly, a website will crumble without proper maintenance. Anyone who neglects their website finds themselves with major repair costs sooner than later.
If you don’t complete regular updates, it’s easier for hackers to break into your website and insert malicious code, stealing data and passwords. Your search engine rankings (the order that websites appear on Google) will tank, making your competitors appear first. And your website will be so slow that people will click out of there before the homepage even finishes loading.
Save yourself time and money by running a tight ship with your website and handling all maintenance and updates on an ongoing basis.
Website maintenance and security can be incredibly technical, and you don’t want to hire “just anyone” to do it. They should be well-versed in the minute details that make a website run properly, including
- Uptime percentage: the amount of time your website is fully operational.
- Page load speed: measure how fast page content loads.
- Regular website updates: update plugins, WordPress, and other tools to make sure they’re the most recent version.
- Checking for 404 errors: ensuring all links on your site lead to content, not error pages.
- HTTPS protocol: securing data between the server and the browser.
- Web application firewalls: protects websites from application attacks, including SQL injection and cookie poisoning.
This is just a small number of the elements on a website maintenance checklist. If you aren’t well-versed in these areas, then you should hire someone else to do it to ensure it’s done correctly.
Don’t leave your website in the hands of a random stranger that messaged you with “mega low rates” on LinkedIn. That’ll leave you with “mega low customer satisfaction” when your website takes ten seconds to load and your target audience goes somewhere else.
A well-maintained website makes it easy for your ideal customers to buy your products or learn more about your services. You want it to run so well every time they visit that they never have a reason to look at a competitor’s page.
e9digital Would Be Thrilled to Unclog Your Website Building’s Toilet
If you have to do website maintenance (which you do), then you might as well hire the people who built your website to do it.
And look, whether we built your website or not, the experts at e9digital love to maintain and secure websites. We can be your superintendent, electrician, plumber, and security; providing ongoing maintenance, backups, and upgrades.
We operate under website maintenance checklist best practices, so your website:
- Loads in under three seconds.
- Contains no 404 errors.
- Remains updated for maximum performance.
- Has multiple backups to protect all your content.
Entrust your website maintenance with the people who love websites, and call e9digital today.
Of course, when you think about a building, maintenance isn’t the only thing that needs to be done regularly. You also have to keep the outside looking pristine. Buildings don’t just have a dirt lot out front (and if it did, you’d never get any visitors).
Next week, we’re going to dig into SEO (search engine optimization), which is the landscaping around your website building that entices people to step inside.
