Imagine what would happen to your car if you never took it in for an oil change or a tune up. It might run okay for awhile, but before you know it, it would stop running. It’s the same with your website. If you don’t have a website maintenance plan, your website will fade, fall lower in search engine rankings and certainly won’t bring you new customers. In fact, it may start turning off old customers too.

Don’t let that happen to your website—one of your most important sales employees! Affordable Web Design has intelligent, scalable website maintenance packages that can keep your website purring like a well-oiled machine with strong SEO and happy, returning customers.

1. Google Likes Fresh Pages—So Do Customers

People like fresh, frequently-updated content on well-maintained websites, just like they prefer freshly-baked bread over stale, moldy bread (or websites). Google likes the same thing. In fact, with each new iteration of Google’s search algorithms, they fine tune their ability to lift the most frequently-updated, fresh websites to the top of search results while letting the moldy old pages fall to the bottom of the results.

Furthermore, if you don’t have regularly updated content, what’s going to keep your customers coming back? Part of your marketing strategy has to be ways to keep building that relationship with your customers by having something new, fresh and helpful for them.

If you don’t have a regular website maintenance plan to keep it fresh, neither Google, nor customers will come calling.

2. Search Engines Don’t Like Broken Links

Sometimes, even in the process of keeping your website current, old pages disappear in favor of new ones. But if any other pages were linked to the old one, those links will break, which is something else search engines don’t like much, not to mention your customers. Everybody hates the old 404 message and it makes your company look bad to customers who are trying to search through your content.

You’re far too busy running your business to sift systematically through your entire website on a daily basis to make sure every single link is golden. That’s why you hire an experienced, expert website maintenance company to do it for you. It’s an investment that will bring you customers and save reputation in more ways than one. For example…

3. Good Website Maintenance Packages Improve Security

In addition to search engines constantly changing the criteria of how they rank your website with your competitors, there is another group of people who are constantly evaluating your website—nefarious hackers! They want your data, your customers’ data and to generally wreak havoc on whomever they can. Website security is business security, and it’s something you simply cannot afford to let slip! Yet the technical expertise to fend off hacker attacks and keep security ship shape at all times is probably not something you have time to acquire. Again, website maintenance packages from Affordable Web Design provide the highest, most adaptable security protection to protect you and your customers from threats that constantly prowl the internet.

4. Regular Website Maintenance Boosts Load Speed and Customer Happiness

How long do you think a potential customer will wait for your website to load before losing interest and heading to Facebook for cat videos? 30 seconds? Maybe 20? Not even close! Try three. Yes, three seconds. That time is even shorter for mobile users (who are now the vast majority of people surfing the web).

And it’s not just customers that are paying attention to how fast your website loads—search engines are now including load speed in their search algorithms, making faster loading pages fly to the top of the search results while slower ones sink down and off to the second, invisible page.

Regular website maintenance can ensure that the pages on your website are beautiful, sleek and fast; don’t let your customers slip off into other rabbit holes.

5. Website Maintenance Plans Can Prevent Embarrassing Website Crashes

If you aren’t using one of the several website maintenance plans available to you to keep your website finely tuned and well oiled, at some point, something is going to crash. Either a hacker will get in and crash it for you, or some technical aspects that simply haven’t been updated in ages will break down in the face of new technical demands on the web. It’s bound to happen, and if it does, your customers will be none too happy about it. Search engines can also tell if a website has a lot of technical problems and they’ll rank it lower than websites that are running smoothly.

To avoid all of these business-killing problems, you need a website maintenance company on your team that will work tirelessly to prevent your website from crashing at the bottom of the search page. Schedule a consultation with Affordable Web Design today to discuss which of our website maintenance plans would best protect your website and keep customers coming in.