Websites need maintenance, just like cars do. Although websites don’t wear out in the same way, they do become outdated. Firstly, the content needs to be refreshed on a regular basis, not only to make it more useful and relevant for your visitors, but also because fresh content is one of the best ways to make your site feature higher in Google’s search results. Or to put it another way, if you don’t add fresh content to your site, you risk it slipping out of site into the backwater of the web where millions of site languish, never attracting a passing glance from any web surfer.
Content editing can be carried out by yourself or it’s something you can have done for you. Get in touch and ask for a quote.
Then there’s the software side of your site. It’s built with software components that all have to work together, like a car engine’s components. These components need to be regularly updated so that all the parts function together in harmony.
Why do these components change so often? It’s a fact of life with software – just think about the number of times the apps on a smartphone need to be updated. Software is never finished – it’s constantly evolving. It’s also an unfortunate fact of life that websites get hacked, and ones that use out-of-date software components are just waiting to get hit. Hackers often don’t know or even care what your site does. They find loopholes in old software and use these to install malicious code on the site. Even if you think you’ve got nothing valuable on the site, the site can be turned by hackers into a delightful spam email factory or a directory of dubious pharmacutical products, for example, which at the very least can damage your online reputation by getting your site blacklisted.
The best defence is to update your site regularly. With a Scheduled Maintenance contract in place, it will be looked at once a month to install any software updates to keep it running as intended and to increase security.
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