Website maintenance and operation is much more than updating a few extensions and making regular backups. Of course, that’s something if it’s done properly.
Let’s take a look at the benefits and why website maintenance is necessary.
Why does a website need to be maintained on regular basis?
We live in a world where everything is developing rapidly. Updates for frameworks, plugins, and programming languages come out almost daily.
It is quite possible that the hosting site will update, for example, php to a newer version and because of this your website will malfunction or die.
This article also includes the fact that a plugin that has not been updated in a long time does not work with the latest PHP version, which means that you cannot edit your website and even throws errors.
In the worst case, your web design Sharjah will be hacked or infected because neglecting regular updates leaves dozens of security holes open.
So it’s not worth to ignore this matter.
Should I do it myself or leave it to the experts?
If you have a colleague with adequate experience in your company, or you understand it and have the time, then it is not worth outsourcing the maintenance of website. If this is not the case, then by all means look for an expert who will constantly deal with your website.
What are the most important tasks of website maintenance and operation?
Nowadays, almost every website is made with some kind of framework or CMS (mainly WordPress).
The main tasks of Website Maintenance:
- Checking the functions of the website – is everything working properly?
- Detection and correction of errors
- Security technical inspection of the website – is there no hacking or infection
- Backup to a location separate from storage (database, files)
- Storage test (operation, updates, capacity)
- Perform current updates of modules, extensions, framework, CMS (IMPORTANT: only after backup)
- Checking the correct functioning of the website after updates
- Preparing a report on the tasks performed (if required)
Additional Optional tasks:
- Analysis of analytical data, fine-tuning of advertisements and website pages based on these
- Database maintenance – optimizing tables, deleting unnecessary data
- Review and optimization of self-produced unique modules, extensions, codes
- Planning and production of new content (due to SEO, for example)
- Expansion and improvement of existing contents
- Creating new landing pages for ads
- Weekly meeting to discuss current developments, problems, and repairs
So you can see that there is plenty of work to do. Of course, the price of managing the website also depends on how much work we put into it.
Benefits of Website Maintenance
In addition to the fact that availability will be guaranteed for you, there are additional benefits if you enter into an operation contract.
Here are the most useful ones.
Safety
The first reason why you should take care of the maintenance of your website is security .
Not only the basic system of your website becomes obsolete over time, but also the environment that runs it, which leads to errors and eventually vulnerabilities.
Whatever CMS or framework is the basis of your website, security fixes are constantly being released, which is why you need to update them regularly.
The runtime environment typically requires less intervention, but when it does, a very fast reaction is required.
Trouble-free operation
Imagine that the system of your website has not been updated for a long time, the hosting service provider changes their mind and rolls out the 8.1 php version globally.
What if your outdated CMS is not compatible with newer versions of php? Are you asking them to revert to 5.4? Obviously, they won’t.
And since nothing has been updated for months, years, you can be sure that the price will be a lot of annoyance and a lot of money.
With regular web maintenance, this kind of problem will certainly not occur, as your website will always have up-to-date updates. In addition, any errors that may occur are repaired much faster than if you did not have a contract.
Availability
Those who enter into a monthly website maintenance Dubai contract with their developer or agency are guaranteed fast response times and short turnaround time for development work. This means that solving their problem takes priority over those who request ad-hoc changes.
So, if there is an urgent problem with your website and you have a monthly website maintenance contract, you probably won’t have to wait at the end of the line for a solution.
Better results
Web Maintenance can include creating new content, SEO, and keyword research. Thanks to these, your website will perform well in the search engines sooner, thus producing better and better results.
By the way, by monitoring the analytical data, it is possible to improve certain parts of the website in order to improve the user experience and increase conversion.