Website Maintenance - Why is it necessary and how much does it cost?

 

“Gosh! It takes so much time for my website to load completely. How can I improve my website speed?”

 

“My website was looking fine yesterday, why does it look distorted suddenly? What could have happened to it overnight?”

 

“There are so many JS, CSS and other webpage errors that are highlighted in red during page speed testing! How can I get these removed?”

 

“My customers are complaining for long wait times during checkout process of my eCommerce store, how can I enhance experience for my customers?”

 

“Why do these website maintenance companies quote so high for their services, I don’t even know what they will do to my website! How can I get a transparent, affordable and trusted service partner for my website?”

Website Maintenance by Aventren | Trusted Service Partner

Well we understand that owning a website for your business is not an easy responsibility and it becomes all the more time consuming and frustrating when you don’t have right solution to the problems in your website. Whether you are just starting up or already running a small or a large business, the challenges in running a smooth website can be daunting if they are left for adhoc maintenance! In this read, we have shared details that are extremely important for anyone who owns a website or an eCommerce store.

 

  1. What activities are done in the website maintenance?
  2. Why should you proactively get a website maintenance and support services?
  3. What is the cost for getting a professional website maintenance?

What activities are done in the website maintenance?

With changing ways of doing business and rise of digital commerce, having a website has become inevitable. However, if you have got a fully functional website or an eCommerce store, you’ve just got your first step right! Further, to ensure that your website is running smoothly there are multiple tasks to be performed at a certain cadence and not to miss these task should be performed by experts who can ensure that if anything goes wrong, things are back in place without causing any disruption to your website and business. So what does website maintenance includes? We have categorized the activities in 4 broad categories for a simpler understanding.

Website Maintenance Includes Activities | Professional and Trusted Services by Aventren

A. Website Performance

When you do any performance test on your website, there are several parameters that get looked. We have covered a few important ones below.

 

  • Website Speed – Blazing fast speed is the most important aspect of having a good website. A slightly less designed website is okay, but a slow website experience will spoil your business and brand name forever. Speed of the website depends on multiple factors, such as your website structure, database size, images, content, theme (in case of WordPress, WooCommerce and Shopify) and much more. For an eCommerce store owners, a good site should load completely in less than 3 seconds. If that fails, then you have lost your customer interest already! You can consider various pagespeed tools such as GTMetrix, Pingdom or Google Page speed platforms to assess your website speed.

 

  • Uptime and Accessibility – Imagine your website suddenly goes down and your customers, visitors cannot access the content. Website downtime can happen due to plethora of reasons and the only best solution to it is proactively monitor the uptime, to respond faster to any such scenarios if they occur and keep solving for potential causes that may lead to website breakdown.

 

  • Website Responsiveness – Have you ever experienced that while you are able to access a website rightly from your desktop or a laptop, but at the other hand someone else while opening from mobile or tablet is seeing a distorted version of the same website. This is due to lack of responsive design of the website. Today, visitors may come from any available device and it is up to you to ensure your website is responsive to all device types. In fact the website these days should be designed and developed with mobile first mindset. It’s time for you to check, if your website is mobile responsive!

 

  • Image Sizing and Minification – One of the biggest reasons to why database of a website becomes heavy leading to a slow loading speed, is the heavy image size. Minification reduces your website image size drastically by up to 75% or more. While there are lot of open source tools with limited access such as tinypng and more, a good maintenance and support for your website can ensure right image sizing for best outcomes in website performance test.

 

  • Caching Optimization – Understand ‘Caching’ as duplicate version your website that’s always available for instant loading experience without putting too much load on your servers, each time a new visitor enters your website url. This technique ensures your website cache serves your visitor an already loaded page faster.

 

  • Order Cycle Testing for eCommerce Stores – If you are an eCommerce store owner, having a website that breaks and does not proceed after customer has entered details for checkout and payment, leads to not only loss of order but negatively impacts your brand image authenticity thereby having larger potential to loss of future sales.

 

  • Hosting Resource Adequacy – Website becomes live on hosting servers which is a very important element when you decide to build your website. A bad or a low resource hosting can cause multiple disruptions, pathetic customer experience, slow website speed and many other issues. While one can choose from various hosting options available from Shared, Cloud, VPS or Private servers depending on the website requirement, it also very important to optimize the usage of your hosting resources for better web experience for your customers. Click to discover our recommended hosting platform.

 

  • Database Optimization – All the files that add up to building of your website forms your database and if the size is bigger, then experiencing performance drop is a no brainer! Hence it is very important to periodically clean the database of your website, by clearing the unused design codes, images, customer details, plugin files, tracking codes that are not in use and much more.

 

  • Solving web page errors of 404/HTML/JS/CSS – Any website can get such errors at different point in times. It is important to remove unused javascript for google page speed improvement. Addressing this requires a technical expertise and should be done by a professional website maintenance company only. Not solving these errors lead to downgraded web experience and drop in functionality itself, leave aside performance.

B. Website Security

You would never want to wake up discovering a security hack in your website. In this digitally advancing world, a lot more speed is picked up by digital threats and new websites with weak web security in place become vulnerable to such potential hacks and data thefts. One such an attack and the whole business credibility come at stake and making it difficult to regain the customers trust back.

 

  • Secured Backup and Disaster Management – Daily backup of your website is a must in current scenario. Most of the good hosting services provide daily backup in their plans. However, just in case there is no backup in your hosting plan, you need to definitely pull up the maintenance and support with daily backup in place, more so if you run an eCommerce store or your website collects customer data.

 

  • Spam Comments Control – With so much advancements and technology usage, a lot of bot activities are placed in the web world to put out the comments that are not relevant for your website content. All such comments are spam in nature and are done with varied intent to belittle your website authenticity, drive your traffic away. All this harm your overall domain authority thereby reducing your SEO rank. Not only a periodic deletion but reporting these spammers for avoiding future interactions is important.

 

  • Shielding from Threats and Hacks – Websites are hacked primarily to steal user database and information, gain illegal control on your website and its operation, in case of payments being made on website, that becomes a huge motive to hack a website and gain financial benefits by a hacker. A periodic check and overall website maintenance reduces the risk of it getting hacked. Moreover, in case of an event where your website gets hacked an immediate professional support is needed to discard the hacked version and gain control through a backup version which makes the hacking event futile and hackers intent gets dissolved.

C. Website Hygiene

Imagine a retail store or an office which is not kept well. When you enter the premise it gives you a messy feeling and you don’t feel like visiting the premise again. Similar is the case with websites, consider them as your business address! Whether it is an eCommerce store or a business website a good upkeep to make it look welcoming and tip-top is a necessity and not a luxury anymore.

 

  • Software/Theme/Plugin Updates – There are several updates required in a website depending on its architecture or built platform. If your website is built on WordPress then your theme, plugins and other integrations will need a constant update. Point to be noted is that it’s not a blind update that is needed, instead a compatibility check of the update with your website is to be done before proceeding. In case your website is custom built, you will still need your codes to be checked and updated depending on the requirements.

 

  • Content Updates – A periodic refresh in the website content by introducing newer pages, blogs and product as applicable. This not only helps in keeping your website look fresh and active but also helps in improving your website SEO rank. Google constantly searches for new content that’s available and hence if you do not have fresh content coming in, the search engines start overlooking your website.
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  • Website Integrations – Your complete website will always have much integration, for impactful and efficient functioning. Google suite, Facebook pixel, screen recorders, shipping and payment in case of an eCommerce, social media links and so much more. Regular maintenance helps in ensuring no such integrations ever breaks and therefore keeps your website in absolute great shape.

 

  • User Management – As non-value adding it may sound, but keeping clean on your website users is very important. Revoking the access of a person/entity after their work is over cannot be neglected. This collates as a tiny steps for ensuring your website safety and customer security.

 

  • Fixing Broken Links – A website can have magnitude of links internally and routing externally too. It is important to ensure there isn’t any broken link, especially high rank ones which could alternatively be utilized by your competitors for their SEO strategy. Internal links and backlinks hold high importance on your SEO game plan and hence should never be ignored.

 

  • Design Consistency – Ill designed and inconsistent brand imagery across your website can do a significant damage if not improved. Usage of the brand colors, brand typography, brand fonts and size, website color schema etc. along with expected user journey adds up to an overall design consistency. While a lot of this gets taken care at the website development stage, but with continuous changes, inclusion of fresh content, the design consistency gets overlooked and over a period of time the website starts looking clumsy! A regular website maintenance and support package can ensure this is taken care, saving you a good bandwidth of time.

D. Website Performance Analytics and Insights

Maintaining a strong digital presence is not a one-time activity but a continuous journey of improvement and sustaining those improvements. These changes over a period of time can be understood only by ways of continuous monitoring and analytical business insights. While business insights are a very broad and different landscape, collecting the right input for business decision making is a first step. We have mentioned below the important data that your website should collect and produce for informed decision making and action.

 

  • User Interactions – This simply means how a visitor interacts with your website. While goggle analytics offers a funnel view of various links that a user navigated, having an access to the screen recording of your website visitor interactions can be terrific to understand the customer psychology. Integrations like Microsoft Clarity, Hotjar are great for someone looking to deep dive into their user-website interactions.

 

  • Traffic Assessment – The best way to get the effective and learned traffic assessment is via Google analytics, free and simple to use platform. While there are various data points that one should track about their website visitors, even a regular monitoring of the traffic count is enough to nudge the improvement discussions as needed. To discuss more about traffic insights you can place a consultation request with Aventren Digital Commerce team and explore how we can help in driving the right traffic for your website.

 

  • Speed MonitoringWebsite page speed optimization is one of the most important aspect for a high performing website. However, to drive and constantly optimize page load time, is is important to do a daily monitoring of the website speed, so that not even a one instance of website latency gets observed by your website visitors.

 

  • Uptime Monitoring – Importance of website uptime can never be a question hence to ensure the same is executed a daily monitoring of the website being up and running will keep you at peace.

 

  • Security Monitoring – Do you know what your website security score is? If not, it’s high time to ensure what goes into the security of your website. A daily monitoring of the elements of your website security is compulsory. This empowers you to take important decision in day to day operations.

 

  • SEO Analytics – Search engine optimization needs no introduction and all those who are in there for a long term plans, know the impact a good SEO plan can bring. Like a fair assessment of any strategy can be tested out with monitoring the key metrics, SEO metrics clearly communicate how everything is working for your website. SEO score, Domain Authority, Backlinks, Organic Traffic etc. gives a real time view of how your SEO plans are shaping up and which areas do you need to pay more importance.

Why should you proactively get a website maintenance and support services?

In this section we will address a few myths associated with website maintenance services and further explain the right outlook that’s relevant for your website performance benchmarks.

 

Myth – I have a fully functional website running fine so far or I’ve just got a new website developed, I don’t need any website support and maintenance right now!

Reality – If you have a website there should be a proactive plan for website maintenance. Despite you having an awesome designed website, the optimization in current functioning and mitigation of the future threats as detailed above cannot be undermined and hence a periodic maintenance is a necessity and not a luxury anymore.

 

Myth – I will get my website maintenance if I face any issue, taking a support plan now is a waste of money!

Reality – From our experience, we have known that a cost of correcting a website malfunction is significantly more than following a preventive checkup and incurring related costs. Treat this like a preventive health checkup of a person. Any illness if detected early can be cured with lesser spends than otherwise.

 

Signing up for a website maintenance services will mean that you will get yourself free from any of the website upkeep. You’ll transfer the headache of it functioning right as per the changing website performance benchmarks to the support partner you decide to work with. On top of this you will get enough of your time free for doing more productive and critical tasks pertaining to growing your business. We’ve listed a few top notch points on how you get benefited by a proactive website maintenance services.

 

  • Your website is always tip-top and up to date
  • Your website will always function with best practices that keep evolving
  • You will never lose your sleep for a risk of your website getting hacked and data security issues
  • Your customers and visitors will never complain of a slow website experience
  • You will not run into heavy expenses for website maintenance suddenly
  • You will have more time to focus on sales generation, which is core to your business!
  • You can always get website changes and content update with ease and in less time
  • Last and also an important one, good website maintenance will never dig a hole in your pocket! Having said this lets us understand the third part of this read, which explains the cost for a professional website maintenance services.

What is the cost for getting a professional website maintenance?

We’ve heard from lots of website owners that they do not opt for website maintenance because they believe it will cost them a lot of money and frankly they aren’t sure if that much money should be paid for the site maintenance and this opinion firms up more by a brands that have just started up. We don’t blame anyone for this opinion, but the existing options of website maintenance plans and packages that are available outside!

 

While the quantum of time that goes into understanding of technical aspects, coding etc. cannot be undermined but we at Aventren have built a service model for your website maintenance wherein you can sign up for the website maintenance services as a monthly plan with no long term commitments/annual contract and that too with a lowest cost guarantee challenge! Else we will offer 3 months of 100% free maintenance to your website. With our model of no annual contract, you will always have a freedom to pause your maintenance services at any point in time.

 

Click here to view our website maintenance plans that will fit your requirements.

With Aventren, signing up for website maintenance will always come as a big relief to you and your team at a very minimum cost. Whether you are a large business, startup or looking for small business website maintenance, you will always be rest assured for extremely polished and highly professional services with us. Our team helps with any eCommerce website maintenance, WooCommerce maintenance, Shopify site maintenance, WordPress website maintenance and custom maintenance plans. If you need to discuss your web maintenance requirements or your digital project with us, either write to us on [email protected] or book a consultation slot with our team using the link here.

“The smoothest, most straightforward way to get everything you ever imagined.”

About Aventren Aventren is an India based professional services firm providing business consulting, digital commerce services, technology solutions and managed services to its clients. With deep industry, cross sector knowledge and capabilities, we bring the right mix of skills and energy to support your business ambitions. Aventren is founded and led by ex-senior professionals from EY Business Consulting.

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