How Regular Website Maintenance Impacts Traffic and Rankings
You’ve invested time and resources into your business’s website. That’s wise because your website is your digital storefront and best sales tool. However, regular website maintenance is necessary to ensure it remains secure, fast, and fully functional. Neglecting maintenance can lead to lower search rankings and reduced visitor engagement. To learn how regular website maintenance impacts Traffic and Search Results, keep reading.
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Real World Experience
I built a website for a mortgage company a couple of years ago. They spent a significant amount of money to build a site that could convert visitors into customers and start the application process. Since the launch, they haven’t touched it. There has been no maintenance, and as a result, the plugins and software are now outdated. A technical audit reveals that the site has slowed down and has some broken external links. I’ve reached out to them with a maintenance proposal, but I haven’t received a response. Websites are like cars. They run great when new, but without regular maintenance, they start breaking down and eventually won’t run at all. You wouldn’t do that to a car. Why do that to your website?
How Maintenance Impacts Traffic
The biggest impact regular website maintenance has is on engagement. According to a Google metrics document, they track “the amount of time someone spends with your web page in focus or app screen in the foreground, which allows you to measure when users actively use your site or app.”
For a visitor to be considered engaged, they must spend at least 10 seconds on a page, trigger a conversion event, or visit at least two pages before leaving the site. Another term for an unengaged visitor is a “bounced” visitor. There are several reasons visitors bounce from a site, including:
The Website Page is Slow
If your average webpage loads slowly or its content shifts during the loading process, visitors get frustrated and often bounce. People have no patience with websites, and slow speeds are the main reason they bounce. Speed is one of the most important measures of a website.
Something is Broken on the Page
Pages that don’t work right are another cause of frustration and bounce. Animation that doesn’t work, a chart that fails to load, broken links, and click-to-call buttons that lead nowhere are all examples of broken elements on web pages. Broken elements are often the result of outdated plugins or plugins now incompatible with other plugins or software.
Outdated Content
Tired or outdated content will quickly send site visitors to the exit. Outdated content tells your visitors that your company is out of business or doesn’t care enough to stay current and relevant. Either way, you lose sales.
ADA Compliance
In most cases, public websites should comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act and provide tools to make it easy for people with visual impairments to access and consume the content. Visitors won’t stick around for long if they can’t easily consume the content.
Regular website maintenance is an investment in your brand. Fast and fully functional websites with current, helpful content tell your visitors that you are open for business and build trust with them. Best of all, they are your best sales tool and help drive sales.
How Maintenance Impacts Search Rankings
Neglecting regular website maintenance will impact your search rankings. To rank at all, Google and the other search engines must have a trusting relationship with your website. When they crawl your site, they can determine the speed at which your pages load, when content is first published, and find broken links. If your website is slow, tired, or broken in any way, the search engines won’t trust it. As a result, they will serve it lower on the page or not serve it at all.
What Maintenance Tasks Are Needed Most
Plugins
The first thing that needs regular maintenance is the website’s software and plugins. WordPress is an open-source platform, so anyone can create a plugin for it. Plugins provide most of the website’s functionality. Plugins enable almost everything, from page building to SEO, image sizing, and technical needs. There is a plugin for just about anything you can think of. The creators of plugins often update their products to enhance functionality, fix bugs, and maintain compatibility with software updates. With every change, the plugin needs an update on the website. While most plugins can automatically update when needed, it’s best to disable automatic updating. Plugins can become incompatible after an update, and manual updates allow you to check the site after each plugin update to ensure your site is fully functional. To learn more about plugins, read my recent article, “Why WordPress Plugins Can Make or Break Your Website.”
Software
Software updates can be tricky. WordPress and hosting companies are generally good about testing software before releasing it. But from time to time, security breaches or incompatibility are unintended consequences of software updates. There is a reason many website developers don’t want to upgrade websites to the latest versions of software immediately. Developers often like other websites to be the guinea pigs, and only after the software is working well for a few weeks will they feel comfortable upgrading their sites.
Software includes the latest versions of WordPress, PHP, backup software, and security software. It’s important to keep everything up to date with the latest versions of the software, but only after they’ve been thoroughly tested and vetted.
Content Audits
Keeping content up to date is essential for a trusting relationship between the website and its visitors. A content audit can quickly identify older content and provide opportunities to confirm its relevance or update it. Include all web pages, blog posts, and housekeeping content in the audit.
Technical Audits
Conducting regular technical audits will help identify any issues with the website. Issues can include anything from broken links to missing SEO elements to site speed influencers, such as unminified JavaScript and CSS code. The audit will provide stats on site speed by page and problems with site maps. Additionally, a backlink audit helps identify toxic backlinks and craft a strategy to eliminate them.
Other maintenance activities should be done, but these are the most important.
Conclusion to Regular Website Maintenance
Investing in a website includes regular maintenance after its launch. Proper website maintenance will keep your website fast, fully functional, current, and compliant. That results in a great user experience and keeps your visitors engaged with your content. Additionally, regular website maintenance will strengthen a trusting relationship between your company’s website and Google. This will lead to higher rankings on search engine results pages, driving more traffic to your site. That means your helpful content can convert more prospects and increase sales. SK Website Works offers maintenance packages for WordPress websites that include controlled plugin and software updates, content audits, and technical audits. We will keep your website as fast and functional as the day it was born and keep Google happy, too.
SK Website Works is a website company that builds trust between your company and your website visitors by focusing on user experience. We build new websites and provide SEO services to keep websites running clean and Search Engines happy. Plus, we create content that establishes our client’s expertise and authority. That builds trust. And customers only buy from brands they trust. Call us to discuss what SK Website Works can do for you.
Thanks for your time, but I’ve gotta run now. There are websites to build and audit, blogs to write, e-commerce to manage, and photos to edit. Until next time, take care.