Your website is often the first experience a prospective customer will have with your brand. As a result, it can create a powerful framing effect. Give them a positive first experience, and that warm afterglow will lay the groundwork for trust and soften any bumps further down the road. Those customers are also likely to revisit your site before making their buying decision. Should they stumble into a broken or hacked website at any point in their decision-making journey, you may never see them again.
Unfortunately, we’ve seen the aftermath and impact of others’ website failures and hacks first-hand, and it’s not pretty.
That’s why industry leaders strongly recommend professional website maintenance services.
Having said that, it’s not uncommon for folks to be a little bit resistant to protecting their sites—and we get it. Your budget is finite, and there are some exciting ways to invest in the digital side of your business—from marketing automation to personalization and more—ways that give you deeper insight into your customers, reduce friction, and accelerate sales.
So, here we are, asking you to set aside some dough for work your customers will never see.
And that’s precisely the point: You never want them to see a broken—or worse—hacked site.
Website maintenance plans help protect you from costly consequences
A poorly maintained website—or one that isn’t maintained at all—is like throwing the doors to your business wide open to a mob boss and asking him to watch the shop while you go on vacation.
And, once he’s in, it can require a lot of painful work to get him out.
Just ask the much-beloved publishing company whose website was riddled with Viagra ads. Or, the local nonprofit whose site pitched shady overseas scams. Or, the respected education company whose website was redirected to a porn site.
It can be tough to understand the value of this recurring investment unless you’ve been there. After all, everything’s fine until it’s not, right?
So, what have we learned from helping out those whose sites have broken—and those who’ve become the unlucky victims of a hack?
A post-hack fire drill is almost always far more expensive than a recurring website maintenance plan (which often delivers other high-value benefits to your business, which we’ll explain later). What’s more, removing malicious content from Google—and other reference sites that customers use to find your business—can take weeks, even months, to resolve.
And, of course, the pain associated with a hack extends far beyond the website clean-up expenses. The opportunity costs run deep, as a hack can cause lasting and considerable damage to your brand and bring sales to a screeching halt.
Worryingly, unless you’re regularly maintaining and monitoring your site, the erosion of your bottom line can go hidden for extended periods of time—until the pain is all too clear.
Strengthen your digital fortress—and be prepared for a breach
Professional website maintenance and monitoring is now a mission-critical part of everyone’s business—yours included.
While some opt for a plugin or SaaS service to save money—this doesn’t catch the things a pro sees.
A successful professional plan includes:
- Automated website monitoring that issues alerts for content, design, and KPI changes—changes that serve as critical early warnings of a malicious attack
- Security tools, including an endpoint firewall and malware scanner, to help keep hackers at bay
- Regular website theme, code, and plugin updates that close otherwise open doors to hackers
- Regular code and database back-ups so that your site can be quickly rolled back should a particularly sophisticated attacker breach security
- A manual review and analysis by a seasoned developer
There is tremendous value to be had in having a professional attend to your site maintenance, beyond keeping the wolves at bay.
Smart web maintenance, monitoring, and analysis by a professional developer can uncover performance issues that suppress your website traffic. And, through well-designed automated website testing, they can find and fix broken user experiences—often before your web visitors ever encounter the issues themselves. Even better, while performing manual maintenance reviews, a seasoned expert can uncover new opportunities to grow your search ranking and drive increases in customer conversions.
This is the kind of necessary work that improves customer confidence, accelerates purchase decisions, and fosters brand loyalty.
It’s the kind of work that, while invisible to your customer, is truly priceless.
Want to protect your website from hackers? Give us a shout. We’d be happy to help you stay safe, keep your business humming, and improve your bottom line.