Website support and maintenance is crucial to keep websites secure and performing well over time.
Without it, businesses risk their reputation. Hack attempts on websites occur every 39 seconds, 45%
of which are aimed at small businesses.

So investing in making sure your website is well looked after is a wise thing to do. Try and think of website maintenance a little like looking after your car.

When you buy or lease a new car, you know that over the course of the 4 or 5 years of having it,
you’ll do things like:
– Have it serviced
– Put air in the tyres
– Wash it
– Fuel it
– Have an MOT
– Fix mechanical issues

You do those things because you know that if you didn’t, your car wouldn’t perform as well. Over
time, it would get less and less reliable, potentially leading to serious problems.
This theory can be applied to your website.

As the months and years tick on with it not being maintained, it will:
– Be more susceptible to being hacked
– Run slower
– Do nothing for your business growth
– Put your customer’s personal data at risk
– Cause you to miss enquiries worth potentially thousands of pounds
– Make you look untrustworthy / not credible as a business

So, make sure the web developer or agency looking after your website, do so properly.
As an absolute minimum, they should be doing the following:

– Providing fast, quality support when you need things doing (like adding new content or fixing
something)
– Performing security updates regularly (ideally weekly, even better daily)
– Taking regular backups and monitoring ‘uptime’ (ie, checking that the website is live)
– Sending you regular reports so that you can see what’s been done and better understand the
value of your investment.

Beyond this, I’d recommend that your developer or agency also:
– Uses an app like Glow to be able to better manage your website. A more efficient process for
them, means a better maintained website for you
– Carry out regular user experience testing – for example, checking that the website forms still
work (otherwise you could miss out on all important enquiries – trust me, I’ve seen this
happen a lot)
– Encourage you to get more from your website by making suggestions on things like new
content to add and ways to improve usability
– Carry out regular speed tests to make sure your website is running quickly (particularly on
mobile)
It really does pay to look after your website.
Trust me when I say that your business will thank you for it.

If you have an accountant, they should be your first stop for business advice. If you don’t have an accountant or they can’t help, BuBul has a wide range of experts available. For more advice contact our expert* Richard on LinkedIn here.

*We’ve picked experts we know and trust who are good at what they do. All of them will give you at least an extra 30 minutes free advice if you contact them and would then charge their normal prices. They don’t pay to be on BuBul and don’t give us any money from anything they earn as an expert.