10 Important Reasons Why Website Maintenance Is Crucial for Your Business
There’s no getting around it. Website maintenance can be incredibly tedious. For many businesses, this is reason enough for site maintenance to take a backseat to other activities. Given their labour limitations, this is often the case with microbusinesses and small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs). However, it’s also surprisingly pervasive among larger businesses.
No matter the size of the business, it’s not uncommon for decision-makers to see site updates as overwhelming or irrelevant, especially if they have non-technical backgrounds. Even when a business does have an IT team, chances are that they are already too stretched thin, with few resources to space for a proper update.
To be clear, a lack of site updates won’t necessarily make an immediate impact on your business. Rather, what happens is a slow and steady degradation of your business’s online visibility, reputation, and visitor experience. Eventually, you will just find that your business is no longer easily searchable on major search engines, which can significantly hamper your online sales.
In this day and age, the value of a good website isn’t even debatable. Ensuring regular upkeep should no longer be regarded as a technical obligation but, instead, an essential investment in your brand’s success. Below, we’ve prepared several reasons why your site maintenance should never be overlooked. If you’re interested in keeping your site up-to-date, contact us to learn about web development services tailored for New Zealand businesses.
1. Keeps Your Site and Users Safer Against Emerging Cyber Threats
Hackers love outdated websites. Old plugins, expired security certificates, and neglected updates are basically an open invitation. Thanks to the emergence of next-generation generative AI tools, hackers have been able to dramatically step up the volume and sophistication of their attacks, increasing the risk for all businesses. At the bare minimum, you should be regularly installing security updates and performing backups to ensure your website’s data and sensitive customer information remain secure.
2. Enables a More Engaging Visitor Experience
Without periodic maintenance, even the best-built websites will eventually slow down. What’s more, they may also develop broken links and feature outdated content that can further frustrate visitors, especially if you’ve been making undocumented changes to the website, potentially driving them to your competitors. Routine check-ups keep your site running smoothly — so visitors stay, enjoy, and actually want to come back.
3. Helps Your Business Dominate Search Engine Rankings
Human visitors are not the only ones who care about your site’s user experience. Search engines like Google and Bing also send out virtual visitors or ‘bots’ to explore websites so that they can be assessed for relevance and usability. Regular optimisation of your site’s navigation, experience, and content signals to search engines that your site is active and is, therefore, trying to engage with visitors, which can boost your rankings. Without periodic updates, search engines may assume that you’re not particularly interested in organic traffic, which can cause a drop in your search rankings.
4. Enables You to Reach Users Across All Devices
If you still imagine desktops when you think of the internet, it’s time to rethink your assumptions. Not only are the majority of global internet users browsing on mobile devices these days, but there are tens of thousands of different device types with various configurations being used at any given time. Regular maintenance ensures that your site remains accessible across all devices, boosting your brand’s visibility to a wider range of internet users.
5. Avoids Expensive Outages
Old content can be funny…or just plain embarrassing. Keep things fresh so your site always reflects your best. Though daily updates aren’t always necessary, adding a few updates every now and then ensures your website reflects your current offerings and customer needs. Many search engines see regular updates as a good indicator of a healthy website that’s worth updating on their respective search results, so it’s important to keep your content fresh and constantly updated.
7. Increases Conversion Rates
For many businesses, this is what it really comes down to. If your website also functions as an e-commerce channel, consistent maintenance is a must to guarantee the site performance and overall experience needed to turn visitors into paying customers. As mentioned earlier, site performance tends to degrade with time, so you will need frequent maintenance to keep your site converting as designed.
8. Helps Your Site Grown With Your Brand
Whether by design or due to external forces, your business must continuously evolve. As this happens, your website should evolve with it. Regular maintenance sessions provide opportunities to add integrations, design enhancements, and updated branding to reflect your growth. With consistent updates, your site can become a truer representation of your brand, inspiring more confidence in its current and future customers.
9. Avoids Serious Legal Challenges
If you haven’t updated your site in a few years, you might already be violating some laws. Across the world, privacy laws such as NZ’s Privacy Act 2020 are constantly being rolled out, often at short notice and with little fanfare. Regular updates and audits help ensure your site meets the regulatory requirements of all the countries and territories it operates in, safeguarding your business from expensive regulatory fines.
10. Maximises Your Site's Return on Investment
Your website isn’t just a digital placeholder—it’s one of your biggest business assets. Treat it that way. When well-maintained, it can be foundational to your brand’s credibility. Even if visitors don’t convert on your site, its performance can still have an impact on their trust by potentially securing their conversion through other digital and offline channels. Keeping your site tidy and optimised is necessary for protecting its value and ensuring it continues to deliver traffic, leads, and sales.
Author Digital Offers Web Maintenance Services That Moves Your Business Forward
Website maintenance is more than just keeping the lights on—it’s about showing you care about your business and your customers. It shows that your business cares about its impact and, by extension, its customers. Investing in site maintenance is just as much an investment in your credibility as keeping your physical stores and offices clean.
The real challenge, though, is ensuring that your maintenance activities consistently support your business goals. We specialise in helping businesses like yours surmount their digital marketing challenges, not just through big actions like site redesigns and rebranding but also through critical but overlooked activities like consistent and comprehensive web maintenance. Whether you just need someone to implement security updates or need thoughtfully crafted content to push your business in a new direction, we’re ready for the task.
Get in touch with us and explore our extensive client portfolio. Let’s talk about how we can support your website maintenance needs. We can handle the technical details and anything else you need so you can focus on shaping your business’s narrative and its long-term growth.
A note
Henry Blackwell
Henry Blackwell is a marketing professional. He has spent the last 10 years working in-house and within agencies, growing profitable businesses through brand and customer-centric digital marketing in New Zealand, Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe.
“My approach to marketing is a combination of heart and head. My heart brings an empathetic and intuitive approach to deeply understanding the qualitative requirements of marketing that many simply do not care to do. My head brings an analytical mindset that leverages data-driven insights to deliver profitable performance for the businesses I work with.
This skill set allows me to deliver systematic customer acquisition, conversion, and retention.”
– Director
