Website Maintenance
from Set & Match

Your new, shiny website looks good! It is boxfresh and healthy.
Your customers love using it and search engines do to.
The visits, clicks and sales start pouring in.

Let’s keep it that way.

Why do I need website maintenance?

You are likely to have invested a substantial amount of time, money and maybe even love in getting your website just as you like it. Although not literally living and breathing, a website will only thrive with care and attention. Things will break and go wrong, just like they do on your car – and that gets maintained with a regular service schedule.
Why would you not want to protect your investment?

What does maintenance involve?

To be the best that it can be, your website wants to be kept up to date and secure. There are always improvements and upgrades to be made, both to the content and the software that keeps the site working.

You will need:

• to keep an eye on the components that run your site to check for updates.
• access to the back end of your site to dig around in the code.
• access to your website hosting provider.
• analytics software to observe and record what’s happening behind the scenes.

What threats does my site face?

Security

Websites are under constant threat of attack, all day, every day.

Over just 36 hours in December 2021, 1.6 million WordPress sites suffered 13.7 million attacks from 16,000 sources.

Automated programs called bots are hunting for weak points in your site’s code. When, not if, they find one, they will strike.
Why are you being targetted? It is not necessarily personal.
Bad actors have a variety of motivations, such as:

• Ransomware
• Identity Theft
• Site Squatting
• Server Breakdown
• Malicious (ex)employees
• Rogue Malware

Reputation

Your website is representing you to the world 24/7.
Surely you would want to present a professional, up to date appearance?
Visitors today expect a certain level of service from a site, especially if they are looking to spend money on it.

• A speedy site is vital, with each page loading in sub 2 seconds
• Broken links leading to 404 pages are a sign of poor management or neglect
• Contact forms should be regularly tested to ensure they are not causing frustration and turning customers away
• Likewise for your sales funnel – E-commerce errors or friction cause abandoned carts and lost sales
• SSL certification (the padlock icon seen on all reputable sites) is essential in keeping credit cards safe, so needs keeping up to date
• Privacy declarations, legal policies, terms of service and GDPR policy will need to keep pace with fast-changing legislation

Essentially, your website appearance matters.
Losing control of it will lose opportunities, leads and ultimately sales.

SEO

As we point out on our Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) page, even the greatest website will be worthless unless it can be found by people.
Regular maintenance will help you climb up those rankings to where success lies.

• Updating content
• Fixing broken links
• Monitoring key metrics

are all tools we can deploy to help you reach top spot in searches.

Recovery

Fire. Flood. Theft. Clumsy Fingers.
You just don’t know what will cause a disaster.
Should the worst happen and your website goes down, you will want to get back up to speed as soon as possible.
To protect yourself from serious harm we recommend:

• Backups you are able to recover your site from
• Backups stored off-site as well as at your premises
• Daily backup of important files
• A monthly full site backup
• Historic backups maintained for 12 months

Can I maintain my website myself?

Yes, of course! It is best to adopt a regular maintenance schedule to keep on top of matters. Accumulating issues before fixing them in one go is expensive and risky. You are likely to suffer some downtime and, by extension, lost business, if your site needs serious repair work. That scenario does not look good to customers, asking “are they still in business?”, or search engines – Google likes a reliable source of answers.
No in-house web developers?
No desire or time to DIY?
We can help. Check out our web maintenance packages below.
If you need a custom service then don’t be shy. Hit us up for a quote.