Just like a car, a website needs regular maintenance to run properly. If you neglect your website for too long your content can become stale, security can be compromised and your SEO ranking can be negatively effected. As your business changes and grows over time, so should your web site. This is why regular website maintenance is an absolute must for all web sites regardless of type or size. At The Rusty Pixel we offer general site maintenance, as well as maintenance packages, for all websites regardless if we created them or not.
About Website Maintenance
Managing Content
Any change made to a website once it is finished is called “website maintenance”. This includes basic text updates, major design overhauls and everything in-between. Keep your content fresh and relevant by creating new pages, adding photos, developing new functionality, and writing blog posts as often as you can. Generating new content is a major part of website maintenance. You and your team can either provide us the changes you wish us to make or we can do it for you with stock-photos and professional copywriting services from experienced writers.
Don’t overlook your existing content. Seeing what works and what doesn’t is a critical part of general website maintenance. Small changes which might seem inconsequential – like swapping photos, tweaking text, refining calls-to-action, adjusting colors and altering the layout – can have a major impact on the success and conversion rate of your web site. Plus frequent updates to what you already have can help prevent your sites content from becoming old and stagnate. Other things also need to be periodically checked such as external links which can become broken over time, interactive elements that can stop working and other critical errors that can affect both look, functionality and usability of your website.
You likely put a lot of time and effort into building your site so don’t just create it and forget about it. We understand that as a busy business owner, regular website maintenance is something that can easily be put on the back-burner and neglected for long periods of time. Even for those with the time, some changes might be too challenging, tedious or advanced for the average person to make themselves. This is where a reliable and established web design company, such as The Rusty Pixel, can step in and help you maintain your website for years to come.
What We Can Do For You
At The Rusty Pixel, when we finish creating a new website we don’t look at it like the end of a relationship, but just the beginning. This is why we offer maintenance packages for those looking to make regular weekly or monthly updates to their site. For those who update their website less consistently, or for those who wish to pay as they go, we offer à la carte maintenance services as well. So no matter your needs, we can help as little or as much as you require. Best of all we pride ourselves on completing your website changes and updates both quickly and correctly the first time so you can focus on your business.
Having trouble figuring out how to use one of those so-called “easy-to-use” website builders? Did your old web designer vanish? Even if we did not build your website, we can definitely help you maintain it. At The Rusty Pixel we have been building and maintaining websites professionally since 2006 and can step in where others left off and assist with any and all changes that you might need. While we primarily work with WordPress, we can and have, worked with just about every major CMS platform out there today. So whether your current web site runs on Joomla, Drupal or even a proprietary system like GoDaddy Website Builder or SquareSpace, rest assured we can help.
SEO
Website maintenance also plays a crucial part of your websites SEO performance. Major search engines, like Google, use complex algorithms to determine SEO page rank for all websites online and how often your site gets updated can effect how well it ranks. So if you web site has been sitting stagnate for months, or even years, then your web site search engine ranking could be negatively effected over time. A site that is frequently updated and continuously growing with new content, pages and posts will dramatically help drive traffic to your website for years to come. The bottom-line is that consistent and regular web site maintenance is invaluable for any effective SEO strategy.
Security
One of the most important reasons to update your website is probably the most over looked – Security. Just about every website utilizes software and plugins in order for them to function, and these need to be periodically updated to ensure that your web site is protected from hackers. If updates are done too infrequently, or never done at all, then the security of your website could easily be compromised putting it at serious risk of being hacked, taken offline or worse. This is why these software updates and security patches are so critical to ensuring that your website continues to function correctly, your visitors stay safe and your web site does not get blacklisted on search engines.
Backups & Support
Backing up a website and technical support are other important facets of website maintenance. Since you never know what could happen, having a clean backup version of your web site theme is critical. This is why we always retain a copy of everything we do and fully index all theme files when taking over the management of a website we did not create. You also need someone to call when something goes wrong. So instead of calling some 1-800 number, waiting on hold and speaking to someone on the other side of the world, you will instead talk directly to a person that knows you and is familiar with your website.
A web site should be a top priority for any and all businesses and regular website maintenance, done right, can have a tremendously positive impact on its performance, security and Google ranking. Unfortunately most people just build their site and forget about it, assuming that website maintenance is something that they don’t need to worry or even think about; don’t let that happen. Prevent your websites content from getting stale or SEO page rank from dropping by updating and adding new content frequently. Deter hackers by keeping software and security patches up-to-date. Contact The Rusty Pixel today for helping designing a brand-new web site or maintaining an existing one. We will keep your website fresh and running smoothly for years to come.