When it comes to websites, the unfortunate truth is that a very high proportion of them aren’t maintained in any shape or form. It’s very easy in the modern-day for businesses to let their website fall by the wayside, with no one looking after them at all.
Most businesses have a website, but not many owners, managers and employees know how to effectively manage it. Website management involves a lot of different tasks, not simply updating your product lists or blogs.
Sound familiar?
- “Someone here can look after the website”
- “I’ll get to it next week”
- “I don’t know how it all works”
- “I’m not sure what I’d do if our site was hacked”
If this is you, have you considered outsourcing to a professional website management company? In short, a website management company will upgrade software, make sure it’s running super-fast, take backups, run security checks, fix problems, and more. As you can imagine, not many businesses have the capacity to manage all these tasks (not to mention it’s a very specialized role), which is why it makes sense to have the right website management service in place.
If you rely on your website to generate leads and provide revenue for your business when it goes down or is hacked, how do you deal with this problem? If you can’t find someone to fix the problem quickly, your sales and revenue are dead in the water, until you do find someone to repair it. Wouldn’t it be better to have a specialist website management company who is on hand to monitor your website and prevent any problems occurring in the first place? But no website is perfect, so inevitably when problems do happen, you’ll get fast support when you really need it.
If you still aren’t convinced that outsourcing the management of your website to an external company is right for your business, let’s take a look at some of these tasks in more depth.
Performance monitoring
Wouldn’t you like to have someone who constantly monitors your website and makes it as fast as possible, all the time? It’s well-established fact that the longer your website takes to load, the fewer leads you’ll get. Even a half-second delay can cause a major loss in leads.
This is why your website management company will set up regular reports so that they’re notified if your website is suddenly running slower than usual, and they can fix it before you even realize there was a problem. This, therefore, has a direct impact on your bottom line.
Threat management and disaster recovery
The security of your website is paramount. You can’t afford to have downtime, a defaced website, customer or administrator data compromised, spam, and all of the other potential outcomes that hackers can deliver. Measures must be put in place to prevent hackers from accessing your site and malware from being uploaded. Backups of your entire website are also important because if the worst does happen and you lose your website, it can be restored quickly by your management company.
Reporting on key metrics
It’s great that you can outsource all the technical problems and day-to-day tasks to an external company, but what about evaluating your key metrics?
Do you know how much traffic lands on your website, where it comes from, and how each visitor uses your website? Is your website highly visible to searchers and does your website rank well with search engines? Are your key metrics reached every month? These are the types of questions every business asks, but finding the answers can be difficult unless of course, you hire a website management company to do it all for you. Most will be able to provide a regularly scheduled report with all of the data at your fingertips.
Support time
While all of the above is fantastic and very important to your business, we all know that ultimately the top concern is going to be support. What happens when you need help with anything from a password reset to investigating a potential hacking attempt? This is where your website management service has you covered, with a (usually capped) time allocation in place each month for assisting with all support issues.
These are just some of the tasks that an experienced website management company can perform to keep your website operating at its best, leaving you to run your business efficiently.
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