Website maintenance may not be the most exciting aspect of owning a website, but it is a really important one.
Just like any key part of your business or organisation, your website works hard behind the scenes every day: attracting customers, generating leads, supporting sales and representing your brand.
But without regular attention, even the best site can slip behind in speed, security, and usability. In a digital world which is constantly changing, you can’t afford to leave your website to the elements and hope for the best.
What exactly needs maintaining?
There are a few different aspects of your site which need some sort of maintenance.
1. Software
The first and arguably most important is the software platform your site runs on. This includes the content management system which lets you make changes to your website content, and the software environment that systems sits within.
Providers like Shopify, SquareSpace, Webflow or Wix typically bundle software maintenance into your monthly hosting fees. The trade-off for this is a reduction in freedom and flexibility in terms of what you can actually do with your site, but that’s fair enough – that’s all part of the deal.
With open-source systems like WordPress – which still holds over 60% market share of website content management systems – the maintenance is often your responsibility as a website owner. The updates and fixes are (usually) freely available, but it’s up to you or your website provider to actually apply them and check the site is still working fine.
If you ignore these updates, there’s a very good chance that eventually someone – or more likely some bot – will exploit a publicly-known vulnerability in the software your site is running.
If you’re lucky, they might just add some spam links to gambling or adult sites. At the other end of possibilities, they could steal your customers’ data or add the digital equivalent of a credit card skimmer to capture credit card details.
In Australia and New Zealand, you are legally required to notify the relevant government privacy authorities of such a data breach, along with the affected customers. This is a seriously embarrassing and reputation-affecting situation.
2. Search rankings
The amount of time your site has been online is one of many factors search engines consider when determining your rankings, but that doesn’t mean you can simply launch the site and forget about it.
Search engines (and the new wave of LLMs) place particular value on fresh content which is relevant to whatever your potential customers are searching or asking for.
That means you need to regularly update your website content to reflect current trends and demands, if you want to keep appearing in search results and chat suggestions.
Tools like Google Analytics can help you understand these trends and what your customers are looking for, making it easier to adapt your content to suit.
3. Technical content
Your website serves content in several different forms. There’s the obvious human-readable text on your web pages, but various other methods of surfacing content are becoming increasingly important, especially with the rise of search summaries and ‘AI’ chat bots which present information both from and about your site.
Structured data is used to feed ‘rich’ search results which go beyond simple text summaries – for example, when you search for your business and see its position on Google Maps, perhaps alongside some customer reviews, or when your products appear in shopping results on other platforms.
There are similar initiatives emerging for AI / LLMs, which are increasingly taking market share from traditional search engines. They still need primary sources for their information, so it will become increasingly important to ensure your website meets them at least halfway, by presenting that information in an easily-digestible way. The sooner you get on top of that, the better your site will perform in the long term.
We’ve got you covered
At Mogul, we’ve championed regular website maintenance and attention since the early days.
Some providers prefer to build you a site and then leave you to it, but we believe in digital partnerships which include taking care of the basics for you, alongside regular reporting about your site’s performance and status and any opportunities for improvement, so you can focus on your business goals.
Get in touch and we’ll recommend a plan to suit your needs.
