When creating a website for your business, you probably put a lot of thought into how the site looks, moves, its content, its functionality, etc. Something you probably don’t think much about is what can happen to your site after it’s built.
Since your website it such a huge part of your business, let’s compare it to other important aspects of your life – your car, your health, your house. We don’t question whether or not these things need insurance. Of course they do! What if we damage the car or are involved in an accident? What if our children get sick? What if there’s a house fire?
We pay for insurance to make sure the important things in our lives stay safe and sound, and your website is no different. You need to replace out-of-date plugins as new ones are released and upgrade your CMS each time a new version is published. If your website breaks or is infected with malware or a virus, you need to get it repaired quickly or face the wrath of Google! You definitely don’t want this to show up under your website in a Google search, after all:
How likely are you to click on a link with the warning “This site may harm your computer”? When your website is hacked, which can and does happen when you don’t keep up with regular security updates, Google will label your website as harmful, warning others that their computers may be negatively affected if they visit your website. Not great for business. We’ve seen it happen, and sometimes it results in businesses needing to spending thousands of dollars to fix their current site, or build a new one.
A Web Maintenance Plan is a life insurance policy for your website, providing the regular service and maintenance it needs in order to stay functional and up to date with security features to avoid hacks that could shut down your site. If you don’t have a web maintenance plan, here are several other reasons why you need one:
- Security Updates: We’ve mentioned it before, but it bears repeating. You need to maintain the security of your website! According to Forbes, on average 30,000 websites are hacked each day. You may think that hackers only attack major websites of big businesses, but you’re wrong. In fact, the majority of hacks are done just to prove that they can be done, and most often smaller sites and blogs are targeted simply because they are likely to be less secure, which makes them easier to exploit. A web maintenance plan protects your site from these hacks by ensuring your CMS and all plugins are up to date and as secure as possible. And if a hacker still gets through, you’ve got someone who can find and remove the problem quickly before it gets spotted and tagged by Google.
- Maintaining a Good User Experience: Technology is updated constantly, and when browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc.) are updated, it can affect how your website looks and functions. As part of your web maintenance plan, we look at plugins each month to ensure they are functioning properly so that all parts of your site look and function the way they should.
- Long-term Savings: When a hack happens (and trust us, it will happen) or when something else on your site breaks, the longer you let it go, the more difficult, time-consuming, and costly it becomes to fix. The choice is really up to you. Would you rather pay a monthly cost to make sure your site is secure and working properly or incur the cost of a complete site rebuild in a worst case scenario, on top of the cost of any business lost when Google labels your website as harmful?
Today, nearly everyone turns to the Internet to find the goods and services they need. Can you really risk your website being shut down due to insufficient maintenance?
corecubed, experts in home care digital marketing strategies, offer a website maintenance plan that is an excellent insurance policy for your website. Contact us today to learn how we can help keep your site and your business running smoothly.