As an entrepreneur, you know the importance of having a website for your business. A website is your digital storefront and is often your customer's first impression of your brand. However, maintaining a website can be a tedious and time-consuming process. Without proper support and management, your website can easily become a liability rather than an asset. In this blog post, we will explore some common website maintenance mistakes entrepreneurs make, and how to avoid them by planning ahead.

Mistakes That Can Be Avoided With Regular Website Maintenance

Mistake #1: Not taking website security seriously.

Your website is not a one-time project; it needs regular updates to keep it running smoothly. Failing to update your website regularly can lead to security breaches, broken links, and poor performance.

What’s the risk?

With the rise of cybercrime, websites are vulnerable to attacks from hackers and malicious actors. One major risk that businesses face when they have a website without managed support is security threats. Without proper management and support, websites are vulnerable to attacks such as phishing scams, malware and other hacking attempts. Hackers can exploit vulnerabilities in the website's code and use them to steal data or take control of the site. By not having a dedicated team managing your website’s security, businesses can be vulnerable to significant data breaches, potential fines, and higher insurance premiums or liability. Opting for managed support services ensures regular updates for content, plugins, and themes to ensure optimal performance and peace of mind.

Mistake #2: Not backing up your website regularly

Website backup is critical to ensuring your website's data is safe and can be restored if needed. Not backing up your website can result in the loss of vital information and worse, it can negatively affect your search engine ranking. Automating backups is one of the easiest and safest ways to ensure that your website data is backed up regularly.

What’s the risk?

By not having backups of your site, including the website’s theme, custom code, website copy, and imagery, if you made mistake #1 and your website was hacked, being able to rebuild it quickly or to remember what goes where if things become messed up when it comes back online (either from an old backup or a corrupt file) then your website stays down for longer and you could lose out on potential business.

Mistake #3: Not optimising the website for search engines

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is critical to the success of your website. Optimising your site creates a certain level of trust that search engines like Google use to rank your website against others when it is looking for relevant search results to provide to people searching.

What’s the risk?

Whilst it’s not life or death to your website if you don’t optimise your website for SEO, it does dramatically affect how many people visit it and how you will need to market it if you want to get more visitors.

Not optimising your content for search engines can result in low visibility, poor traffic, and ultimately, lost revenue. Besides, failing to optimise your website structure and speed can also result in a poor user experience. It's important to hire an SEO expert to handle website optimisation if you're not well-versed in the field.

Please note: It’s not common for web developers to offer SEO optimisation in their website maintenance packages but at Gem Media, we feel it’s a vital aspect of our website concierge plans to provide a holistic service for our clients in order to obtain the best results.

Mistake #4: Not having a website strategy in place

In order to make sure that your website is effective, it is crucial to have a coherent strategy when making edits and updates. By not having a website strategy in place, you run the risk of your website not essentially doing what you want it to. Good quality website domains and hosting plans are not cheap and something you have to pay for year after year so you want to ensure you are getting a ROI on your investment.

What’s the risk?

A lack of strategy can have a significant impact on the integrity and quality of your website. Without a clear plan, it is easy to make haphazard changes that can lead to confusion, broken links or other issues. The result can be a website that is disorganised, hard to navigate and ultimately frustrating for users. To avoid these problems and maintain the quality of your website, it is important to take a strategic approach to website updates and edits.

Mistake #5: Not testing and setting up proper tracking

Testing is essential in ensuring that your website's pages are running correctly and efficiently. Not testing can lead to broken links, dead pages, and lower search engine ranking. Furthermore, if you don't set up proper tracking, you cannot measure website performance and make informed decisions. Regular testing and regular tracking can help you catch issues before they escalate into larger problems.

What’s the risk?

Following up from mistake #4, as part of having a website strategy, you will also have a method of tracking whether your website is converting as desired and whether or not improvements need to be made to ensure that it does. Without any structure for tracking and testing your website, you won’t know how things are going.

Mistake #6: Not employing a professional website management team

The most common reason that business websites fail is a lack of technical expertise. Website management can be overwhelming, especially for an entrepreneur running their business. You need to have a team of experts that can handle the technicalities of your website, leaving you to focus on your business. With a professional team, you will have peace of mind as experts ensure your website's optimum performance, security, and reliability. Additionally, with their expertise, any problem can be solved quickly and efficiently, minimising downtimes.

What’s the risk?

Website technology is constantly evolving and business owners can struggle to keep up with the latest trends and updates. This can lead to costly mistakes, such as unknowingly using outdated or insecure technology. Managed website services can help to bridge the gap between technical expertise and business needs by providing a team of experts who can manage and maintain your site on your behalf.

Website maintenance requires planning and consistent effort. By avoiding the above mistakes and employing an expert website management team, you can save yourself time and valuable resources. Maintaining your website is essential to attract visitors to your website, retain existing ones, and ultimately make a profit. It's critical to take website maintenance as part of your business operations and prioritise regular updates, backups, optimisation, testing, and professional management. Remember, you don't need to do it alone when you can have a website concierge that can handle website research, optimisation, testing, backups, and upgrades on your behalf.