If this title has you scratching your head, we’re here to help! Strange as it may sound, your car and your website really do have a lot in common. Just like your car needs regular maintenance to avoid costly repairs, so does your website. But unlike when your car is in for service, and you get a loaner, there aren’t loaner websites. This means staying on top of website maintenance is key to keeping your site running smoothly.
Check the Tires
Checking the tires on your car keeps it safe on the road. For your website, checking the site analytics can help to uncover any unknown issues with your site or the content, such as a page with a high bounce rate. Analytics can also identify where traffic is originating from and how visitors are accessing your site( i.e., mobile device or desktop). This information can help influence businesses’ marketing decisions as well as content on the site.
Change the Oil
Oil changes are essential to the longevity of your car—and for websites, so are regular updates. Regular updates include all aspects of your site, including plugins and PHP—the language your site is built upon. Some servers will run automatic updates to ensure the safety of the servers, but the result may be that WordPress and PHP are out of date or out of sync, rendering the site slow and possibly malfunctioning. Often, updates are necessary to patch holes in the security code for the site, which makes regular updates even more important.
Full Detail
Regular maintenance isn’t just for the insides of the car but also the outside. Just like a good wash and wax keep the paint looking fresh for years, so do content updates for your website. Keeping your site content such as descriptions, About page, and blogs fresh is beneficial not only for site visitors but for SEO as well. SEO is heavily determined by Google Ranking Factors, and many of those factors include the age of the site’s content.
Lock It Up
What’s the first rule for keeping your car safe? Lock it to help prevent break-ins! And just like your car, you need to lock your website too. Ensuring that your security certificate is up, as well as all of the other aspects of the site like plugins and PHP (the language the site is built in) keeps your site safe from hackers and damaging malware too.
Loaner
We know that we said there was no such thing as a loaner website. However, Hammersmith Support maintenance clients enjoy having full site backups made each month. If something happens to the site that takes it offline, the backup version of the site can be utilized to more quickly restore it to working order.
Let’s Get Started
At Hammersmith Support, we work with companies of all sizes and provide them with resources usually only available at larger web agencies, except we provide them with a more personal and accessible touch. Schedule your complimentary 30-minute consultation and let’s discuss how we can support your business.