Building a new website can be a long process, but the joy of launch date is hard to beat! Once the site is launched, though, what’s next?
We like to say that “a website is never done“. The day it launches is amazing, but you should immediately be moving into maintenance and improvements. These are two separate things, but both are vitally important if you want to hit your goals.
Maintenance
“Maintenance” sounds like a boring word, and website maintenance is certainly boring—and that’s a good thing. Much like the sound techs at a concert, you only notice poor website maintenance when something goes wrong. Consistency and predictability are great things for both sound techs and website maintenance.
So what’s involved in website maintenance? We detail it on our support services page, but it really boils down to a few key areas:
- Backups: If something goes wrong, backups are gold. You can never have too many.
- Updates: With a WordPress site, you need to pay attention to WordPress core updates, plugin updates, and theme updates. Sometimes those updates bring new features and sometimes they patch security holes, and they’re always a good thing to stay on top of.
- Monitoring: You should be running regular malware scans as well as monitoring the uptime of your site so you can be quickly alerted of any problems.
There’s more that can be done for maintenance, but if you cover those three main areas you’ll generally be in good shape. Of course, maintenance is really just intended to help maintain the status quo. If you want to advance, you need to be looking at improvements.
Improvements
Once your site is live and running smoothly, you should be looking at new pieces you can put into place over the coming weeks and months. This often comes in the form of content: new blog posts, email marketing pieces, and social media updates.
It can also come in the form of new features: perhaps you’ll add a hiring system to your site, or a new portfolio of projects, or you’ll finally start that podcast.
Whatever you do, whether it’s new content or new features, the advantages are tremendous and are mostly centered around two main benefits:
- Google loves content. Generally speaking, the more high-quality content you add to your site (blog posts, portfolio pieces, etc), the more traffic Google will send your way.
- Users love content. They will often arrive on your site directly on a specific piece of content, but having more to choose from also gives users more opportunities to appreciate your knowledge and past experience.
When your new site goes live, take some time and celebrate! Once the celebration winds down, dig in and make a plan for maintenance and improvements so that your site will continue to grow and help your business thrive in the coming years.
How We Can Help With Website Maintenance
Keeping your website updated and adding new content is a crucial but time-consuming process. With your busy schedule, you may not have time to get to it all. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
GreenMellen offers website maintenance packages, as well as ongoing services to add fresh pages and content to your site. If you need help with ensuring your website is working properly, reach out to us.
