The Importance of Basic Website Maintenance

Web maintenance isn’t something a lot of online entrepreneurs think about. In fact it can be quite a mundane task for most. However, it is important to keep your website ticking over smoothly.

Here are a few reasons why maintaining your website is important:

Attracting the search engines

Search engines are important to the livelihood of your online business, but they don’t like idea websites. Websites, which have been left static without updates or fresh content, are a no-no in the online world. Another thing search engines don’t like is broken links. As you build your web pages its easy to miss broken links. A good strategy is to double check every link you add to your website. Inevitably you may miss some or some may become broken with time (as web addresses change and so on).

Regular maintenance and checkups for your website will help you spot these broken links and keep your customers and search engines happy in the process.

Updating information may increase your sales

Regularly looking over your website will also help you make changes and adjustments as necessary. For example, you may have started promoting what was a great product two years ago but now that product may be outdated and not so great anymore. By updating your website you may find products and promotions which are a better match for your visitors.  Look through your old web pages to see if there are any promotions, which can be updated or given a little extra oomph’s. Times change and on the Internet time moves at a faster speed, “keeping up with the times” is important and you can do this by simply looking over your pages and tweaking as you go along.

Keeping track of your stats is important; another part of your basic web maintenance is keeping on top of all your visitor statistics. It makes sense to regularly go through your website and check how many visitors you have on a monthly basis, where they’re coming from, how they’re finding you, what pages they’re accessing and so on.A running log of these statistics will help you quickly identify any potential problems such as loss of traffic or reduced income from sources such as Google Ad Sense and so on.

Regular web maintenance for your website is important. It can help you keep up with changing times, help to attract more visitors and ultimately make you more sales. If you find this task difficult to squeeze in, try scheduling it in for a set time each month or every few weeks. It shouldn’t take long and the time investment may make all the difference to your business. And finally, if you don’t have time to do the web maintenance yourself you can always think about hiring an assistant to help you with this task.

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Author: jm

Joan Mullally has been doing business online for more than 20 years and is a pioneer in the fields of online publishing, marketing, and ecommerce. She is the author of more than 200 guides and courses designed to help beginner and intermediate marketers make the most of the opportunities the Internet offers for running a successful business. A student and later teacher trainee of Frank McCourt’s, she has always appreciated the power of the word, and has used her knowledge for successful SEO and PPC campaigns, and powerful marketing copy. One computer science class at NYU was enough to spark her fascination with all things digital. In her spare time, she works with adult literacy, animal fostering and rescue, and teaching computer skills to women.