Website Maintenance Packages

Now that you understand the value of website maintenance, it’s time to figure out how much of the website maintenance you actually need.  Much like any other purchases you make for your business, the rates and prices should not be the only basis or the primary basis for the final choice.  Ultimately, the website’s needs are to be considered and it all depends on what type of website it is, its volume of traffic, and the kind of users or visitors it caters to.

A site analysis should be the first order of businesses when choosing from website maintenance packages.  Ask the service provider if they can give you this service for free to determine how much work needs to be done on how frequent it should be done.  If the site analysis comes with the package, then that’s a good place to start.

A site analysis report should include the website’s loading time, SEO optimization rating, file sizes and a few suggestions on how to improve the website further to meet the demands of its visitors and its market.

Website maintenance packages vary by frequency of the service per month.  As mentioned earlier, the website maintenance package you choose will depend on how often you require updates.

Most small businesses have websites that have a maximum of 3 to 5 pages, with only a few images, videos, information and a contact page.  These types of sites require no more than 3 to 4 updates per month. 

There are website that have multiple pages but do not have a large amount of text content. It rarely needs updating but often requires additional activity just to keep the site active and interesting such as a blog page.  This is still considered within the range of a simple website that requires a website maintenance package that gives services between 3 to 6 times per month.

Most websites that need website maintenance packages that offer daily updates and maintenance or a minimum of 10 updates per month are websites that incur heavy traffic and has call to action buttons, comment sections and plug ins, forms or order pages as well as carts. These types of webpages are usually in the field of online retail.

Website maintenance packages allow website owners to personalize the service depending on the need and the budget.  

Reasons Why Website Maintenance Is a Must

 

A single internet user will be able to access hundreds of websites and click through web pages in a day.  As a webmaster, the goal is to make sure that a particular internet user will browse through the entire website and finally take action.  Action (being the operative word) means either to sign up, subscribe, like, share the site or make a purchase.  If the website you have developed does not prompt visitors to do anything or to even stay longer than a few seconds to browse some more, then you are doing something wrong - and quite terribly so especially if website traffic is brought in by high cost advertisement.

Websites are created once but it must be regularly maintained.  The kind or level of website maintenance (or upkeep if you will) would depend on the purpose and content of the website; some are more “high maintenance” than others.  Nonetheless, the reasons and the subsequent website maintaining tasks are fundamentally the same.  And the reasons are:

To keep the visitor interested enough to “see more” or “read more” – it takes only a couple of seconds to convince visitors that “this site is great”, so if your website says “this site is going to be great” you’ll need to fix some things so that it will load faster.  If you have this pegged and still can’t get enough visitors to convert, then you need to do a content evaluation. Your content need to be engaging and exciting, it does not have to be riveting and compelling, just well thought of, well researched and simply catchy.

Website maintenance also affect Google ranking.  It’s like doing regular check-up “under the hood” to make sure you stay on the top three of the race. Everyone has different theories about how websites wind up in the top three pages of Search Engine Result Pages (SRPs) but its clear that it’s a popularity race which is won by proper website maintenance.

Repeat visits is also a goal and your website maintenance team will be able ensure this if they do the job right.  There should be a constant flow of new information and new things to see.  Texts, links, images and videos should all be working if you want the attention of the visitors for long periods of time.

Keeping up with new technologies is also part website maintenance.  This means engaging in tasks like tweaking the website for browser compatibility and adding plug-ins that help make the site more users friendly.

All in all, website maintenance is all about making sure you keep your visitors happy and your goals achieved.