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The Five Biggest Website Maintenance Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

The 5 Biggest Website Maintenance Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Contributed by Idea Collective Member:

Catherine Wilson

Catherine Wilson

President & Director of Web Services at Eviva Media

The importance of a website cannot be talked about enough. It’s not just an online presence - it’s often the first place potential customers go to learn about and interact with your company.

It would be pretty stressful if your website stopped working, right?

As the website services director at a full-service website & marketing agency, a broken website is one of the most common things prospects say when reaching out! If your website isn’t properly maintained, you risk getting hacked or dealing with other issues like site slowdowns or functionality problems.

Think of it like your car. What happens if you decide to stop getting an oil change? I’m no mechanic, but I’m pretty sure you’d hear all sorts of noises from your engine.

Your website can make “noises” too. They may look like:

Many issues come without warning. Hackers are constantly looking for vulnerable websites to break into. Here are the five biggest mistakes around website maintenance and how to avoid them:

Mistake 1: Ignoring Or Avoiding Website Maintenance

When you avoid your website maintenance altogether, you’re just asking for problems! But shockingly, this is the most common mistake that business owners make. Some don’t see the value in website maintenance, mistakenly believing website errors are rare. Think about how you feel as a customer when you try to visit a broken website. That frustration is how your customers feel when your website is not working properly. Avoiding the problems won’t make them go away, and it can increase your downtime when problems arise.

Mistake 2: Relying On The Hosting Company

Do you purchase your website hosting directly from the hosting company? Many times these are shared servers that do nothing to protect your website. In fact, if another website gets hacked or runs into problems on a poor shared hosting server, it could open up your website to issues or potentially take your site down! It happens frequently. When you only have hosting and no maintenance, you miss out on performance and security. If your hosting company offers website care plans, ask them how they backup, what kind of security they use, and how often they perform updates. If you aren’t satisfied with their answers, it’s okay to look in another direction.

Mistake 3: Forgetting Content

Nothing is more important on your website than your content. Content is the material that makes up your website, including text, photos, and videos. Regular maintenance can find issues with your content and correct them, and new content can be added. Customers love to see new, interesting photos, videos, and fresh and exciting text when they log on to your site, so give them what they are looking for. Regular maintenance can ensure your promotions are up to date, showcase new products or services, and remove irrelevant information from your website. It’s also a great time to take customer feedback about your site and make those user-friendly changes. Website maintenance can help increase your visibility on search engines, too. And what business owner doesn’t want that?

Once you’ve made your changes, simply republish the updated content and share it on all of your social media channels multiple times to give it a big SEO boost!

Mistake 4: No Backup

Think back to when you were in school. Did you ever write a paper on the computer, forgetting to hit “save”? Not having frequent backups for your website is similar, only this mistake could cost you a lot of money and wasted downtime. You can lose your whole website without a backup, forcing you to start over. If you do have backups, make sure you aren’t backing up to the same server that your website is on. If it goes down, so does your backup. This could cost you much more than if you initially invested in a care plan. If you have a backup, you can get back to work quicker and save a lot of stress and money!

Mistake 5: Going Solo

You run a business, you manage employees, and you keep your costs low and profits high. Surely you can manage your website maintenance, right? Wrong. Unless you run a tech company, chances are you do not have the expertise or the equipment to manage your own website maintenance successfully. It may be hard to admit you can’t do it all, but in the long run, trusting website maintenance to the experts can save you tons of stress and a massive headache, which is something all business owners can appreciate.

Your website is how the world finds you and how your customers connect with you. It’s how they find information about your products or services and how you complete orders. Your website is the hub of your business, so protect it the right way. A website care plan from a reliable website agency can provide you with peace of mind, reduce the stress of taking care of it on your own, and ensure your content stays fresh and relevant.

You have so much to do during the day. Managing site maintenance doesn’t have to be one of your obligations. Join me in The Idea Collective, which has an entire community of experts who can help you with any aspect of your small business. I’m very proud to be part of something bigger than myself, that can help the small business community take their company’s to the next level.

Catherine Wilson

Contributed by

Catherine Wilson

President & Director of Web Services at Eviva Media

Catherine Wilson started Eviva Media to help businesses like yours find the same digital marketing success she had created for large corporations. Now, more than a decade later, she has built a team of developers, designers, copywriters, and marketing professionals—all of whom are highly experienced working with small and medium-sized businesses.

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