Website maintenance is important! You can’t just build a website and then forget about it. Well, you can, but you’ll regret it. Websites are a major investment for most companies and as such, they should be properly maintained. What does this maintenance look like?
Security Updates and Version Updates
One important aspect of maintenance includes updates for the various plugins, and versions of themes, and content management systems used to build your website. If these plugins aren’t updated they can stop working properly—which affects the functionality of your site.
As your website evolves, there may be plugins you no longer utilize on your site. In those cases, those plugins should be deactivated to ensure they aren’t creating a security risk. Hackers have been known to access websites through deactivated plugins. Removing unused plugins helps decrease that risk.
The developers who build plugins and content management systems (for example, WordPress) are constantly updating their products. Sometimes this is to debug an issue that has arisen, and sometimes it is to increase the functionality of the plugin. Either way, keeping your plugins and CMS versions updated ensure that your website is always performing in the way it is intended.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
In addition to updates for plugins, search engine optimization (SEO) updates are important. A beautifully built website might as well not exist if it can’t be seen by search engines.
Search engines look for up-to-date and relevant content when they crawl websites for the answer to a search inquiry. Your website should have updated SEO to give search engines new information to crawl and present to a user. Search engines also update their algorithms regularly to ensure they are capturing the latest information.
In addition, keywords and metadata can change for your business and should be updated as needed as well to stay relevant for your target audience. SEO is constantly evolving and should be a major part of your ongoing marketing efforts.
Need some help with web maintenance? Baseline offers monthly maintenance and SEO packages for nearly every budget. Contact us to get your site up to date or get more information.
