Maintain your website now, so it’s not a problem later.
Face it, no one likes doing maintenance. Whether it be your car, house, or your website. Like it or not, you need to maintain your website. If you ignore it long enough, it can create significant headaches and expenses.
Website maintenance seems to be easy to ignore since it’s not as visible as other kinds of maintenance. If things appear to be running ok, it tends to get pushed back as other things always seem to be a priority.
January/February has become a very busy season for my business. I see more new website development quote requests come in than other times of the year. I think this has to do with the start of a new year. People are motivated to start something new. This time of year is a great time to motivate your self to address website maintenance, making updates to website content, and a security review. Addressing maintenance a little at a time can make it easier to manage. Make a list and check them off one at a time when they get done, you’ll get there.
Things You Can Do To Maintain Your Website
These are general things you should review to maintain your website:
- Does your website have a secure certificate installed and is properly loading over a secure connection (SSL)?
- Are you using current versions of technology on your web server? (PHP 5.6 is no longer supported as of Dec. 2018, you should be running PHP 7+)
- Is your website mobile friendly?
- Do you have a full website backup (code and database)? Do you make regular backups of your website?
- When was the last time you changed your website’s passwords?
- Have you done anything recently to make your website load faster? (Google rewards fast websites with higher rankings)
- Have you done anything recently to optimize your website for search engines? (What good is a website if it can’t be found in search engines?)
- When was the last time you edited your website content? Does it reflect your business’ current offerings? What is the copyright date showing at the bottom of the page? : )
- WordPress maintenance has even more things to consider on top of what I have mentioned here. There is ongoing code maintenance needed to keep your site secure.
How much does it cost to maintain a website?
There are some fixed ongoing costs like web hosting fees and annual domain renewals that you can account for, but the cost to maintain website code and content varies greatly since it depends on many factors like the size of the site and features that are built into it and how it was built.
Another factor is if you are going to maintain it yourself or need to outsource web maintenance services to a developer or website maintenance company.
If you Google “How much does it cost to maintain a website, you will see the crazy variations of pricing that people are arbitrarily suggesting. They mean nothing when the range is so vast. Pricing really needs to be evaluated on an individual website level by requesting estimates for services.
The Internet is Constantly Changing
The Internet and website technology evolves at an incredible speed. Google has been in existence for less than years (1998), iPhones have only been around since 2007 and mobile friendly web design starting to become used several years after this. (I started including it in my web design proposals in 2012). Think of all of the changes that need to be done with website code to keep up with these significant changes in technology. If your website is 10 or more years old, you really need to think beyond web site maintenance – it’s time to redesign and rebuild your website.
