Once you relaunch your brand new website, next comes website maintenance. Some website owners try to save money by avoiding website maintenance. But this could lead to bigger costs down the road when untouched websites start to fail. Regular maintenance will save money in the long run. Here is how.
How Website Maintenance Benefits Your Site
Website maintenance is not about avoiding a major crisis. Website maintenance done well helps creates a competitive website that grows your business. Here is how:
Maintenance extends the life of your website.
The average cost for an agency to build a small website in 2025 is $3000-$50,000. This is the cost for a small website industry wide. How often is your company replacing your website? How much money could you save if you delayed replacing your site one year or even 5 years?
Website maintenance keeps your website current. A website that is always current will not need replacing. Your site has the latest software. Users find the latest information on your company. Everything is up-to-date, why do you need a new website?
Each year you can delay redoing your website, you save money. Website Maintenance makes that possible.
Think about some of today’s most successful websites. When was the last time you saw a site like Amazon or Walmart or Facebook take down their site and replace it? You don’t and they won’t. Instead, they make continuous improvements over time.
Maintenance Improves User Experience.
Website visitors don’t have a lot of patience for troubleshooting your website. If your pages won’t load on their device or their browser, they won’t spend a lot of time figuring it out. Websites that work for everyone are easy to use. Maintenance should include regular checks to make sure everything is working well.
What things turn website visitors away? Broken links, outdated information or maybe security warnings? All of these can be found and fixed during routine maintenance. Fixing small things as they break is a lot less costly then waiting for the site to fail. Updating content on a regular basis, even making small tweaks to keep things current, is cheaper than a full rewrite. All are good practices to make your website better for visitors.
Website maintenance improves sales and conversions.
We had a client come to us to help update their 10 year-old company website. They were getting feedback from visitors that they were hesitant to use the site because it was so old. Users said it made the service look old too and couldn’t handle potential new projects.
Your website is factoring into sales decisions. Visitors to your site will ask about your new product or service if they find the information on your site. When visitors like what they find, they will stay. They will contact, sign-up and request to get in your sales pipeline.
Routine maintenance will also check signup forms. Make sure you are receiving contacts as they come in. If you haven’t received a lead off your website in awhile, don’t assume business is slow. It could be old website code unable to deliver your messages.
Don’t Forget Website Security
The number one reason to do maintenance on your website is to improve security. What is the cost to clean-up a website after a malware attack? It can range from anywhere between a couple of hours of webmaster time to starting over with a new website. No matter, its a cost that no one plans for. But the benefits of regular maintenance remove the risk of getting this bill. Users shy away from sites that look risky. Especially if they receive warnings when visiting your pages.
Benefits of Website Maintenance include cost savings. Improvement in website performance. Better security and better user experience.
Areas of your site that could cost you without maintenance.
Up-to-date websites get more attention. The more updates you are posting, the more maintenance you need. Skipping website maintenance wastes money. Here are examples of websites that can’t afford to skip maintenance.
- E-Commerce sites or sites that take orders online. Any glitch or hesitation by your website to function could loose a sale. It is a leap of faith for a website visitor to buy something from a website that they are visiting the first time. If pages load weird or a link does not seem to respond, you could scare an online buyer. Maintenance would catch these problems.
- Spending money on digital advertising to send traffic to your website. If you are buying online ads, regardless of the source, you are paying for visitors to come to your site. What do they find when they get there? Any problem they find that causes the paid visitor to leave is a waste of money. You are paying for clicks only to send visitors to a bad website where they won’t stay.
- Rely on Organic Search for the majority of your site traffic. A lot of the work to rank for organic search is ongoing maintenance. It could be Technical SEO issues. Or reviewing the performance of your content. Keeping your site up-to-date keeps Google interested in your site too. When you do nothing, you have no chance to improve. Search position starts to gradually decline until your site is no longer part of search.
Does Website Maintenance Benefit Search Rankings?
I believe so. Many key ranking factors need maintenance to rank high. Checking site speed. Cleaning up errors messages from pages not displaying to security warnings. Regular content showing the site is active and current. All these things factor into your search rankings. And all are part of regular website maintenance.
Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines include instructions for reviewers to look for signs of maintenance. Instructions include looking for out-of-date content and technical issues that need to be fixed.
Key factors to ranking well in search are the sites index ability and discoverability. If search engines can’t get to your content, they can’t rank it. Website software that is missing updates can prevent search crawlers access to content. Sites with a CMS (Content Management System) need regular software updates. Search rankings depend on this.
How can my site benefit from website maintenance?
At a minimum, you will want to address website issues on monthly basis. As part of Cybervise’s website maintenance services, we address security and functionality issues on a weekly basis. Google sends alerts on technical SEO issues on a weekly basis through Search Console. I would use that as a base line to judge whether your site is getting the attention it needs.
To produce a professional website, you need a dedicated resource. You may not be ready for an internal resource. In the meantime, there are many benefits to a hiring a professional webmaster.
For more information on the benefits of website maintenance, check out our webinar recording. Website Maintenance – Do I Need it?
