Momentum - Business to Business Online Magazine October 2016 | Page 10

Website Maintenance IS CRITICAL! Website maintenance is a must do activity! You are making an enormous mistake if website maintenance is not a regular feature of your weekly activities. I use the word feature to emphasize the activity. Maintaining your home, maintaining your automobile, & maintaining your health are all universally understood important activities. However, most websites are not maintained properly. An average business website today will cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $7,500.00. Some are less; however, many are easily twice that amount. With that in mind, why would you not want to protect this investment? If you don’t maintain your website, don’t be surprised if it does not perform the way you expect. A poorly maintained website will not rank well with Google. Not ranking well with Google defeats the purpose of having a website. Website Maintenance Activities; 1. Domain Name – Make sure that your website’s “Domain Name” is owned by you and in an account in which you are the administrator. If you lose control of your “Domain Name” you can lose control of your website. GoDaddy does this process of Domain Name Maintenance very nicely and it is not expensive. It will cost about $15.00 per year, per Domain Name. Domain Names are rented for annual periods of time and can expire if you are not maintaining its active status. 2.Website Host – Know where your website is being hosted. If you don’t know this you can lose control of your website. There is a monthly or annual fee for website hosting.The fee is dependent upon the services provided by the website host. Basic website hosting will cost about $15.00 per month. 3. Website Updates – Today’s modern websites utilize Content Management Systems (CMS). They are designed and developed with a platform, theme, & plugins by website developers worldwide. Often “Code” may need to be written by the developer to achieve a desired result. The amount of “Code” depends on the complexities involved. These platforms, themes, & plugins periodically have updates from there authors or team of authors to improve performance or for security reasons. Most websites today will have 10 MOMENTUM / October 2016 By Steven Reddy, Select Marketing [email protected] 5-6 updates per month. Process the updates just like you do on your smart phone. This process usually takes less than ten minutes. If you ignore this, your website will suffer by gradual slowed performance and/or security issues. Process the updates and protect your investment. 4. Website Browsing – Browse your website frequently. You are looking for any website changes from its original launch date appearance. For Instance; Missing Text/Pictures/Videos, Broken Links & Broken or Missing Forms are all things that can go wrong.The culprit may be malware from the Internet. Processing Website Updates may also cause these problems if there are compatibility issues within your websites framework. After you process website updates always browse your website for potential failures that need repair. Usually these failures are minor and require only a minor repair. 5. Website Backups – Website backups make a copy of the content and architecture of your website. If you do this occasionally it will protect your website from becoming “Lost in Space”. A website can be exactly re-developed if necessary from a backup. While catastrophic circumstances are rare, they do exist, and they destroy websites. 6. Malware Protection –The internet is infected with millions of virus software programs that are designed to cause you, your computer, and your website problems. If infected, your website will look, act, or function differently. Often times it has a gambling theme or adult porno pictures, videos, and links. These links take your website visitors to the invading gambling or adult websites. That’s probably not what you want for your website visitors! Most of you are not website developers. Therefore, hire someone to maintain your website.Think of them like your auto mechanic or your lawn maintenance folks. If you perform the above mentioned website maintenance weekly your website will run better and perform to its fullest.