You have this lovely business website. Its ranking keeps dropping on search engine results. Why? Because you haven’t been maintaining your website. WordPress website maintenance is important. By not maintaining your website you are risking security vulnerabilities, increased page loading time, poor user experience, and declining search engine rankings.
First impressions are important
Your website represents your business. It is often the first marketing a person is exposed to for your company. Broken links and out-dated information make your business appear unprofessional. People may assume that you’re out of business or have a poor work ethic. Neither is a good quality for your business.
Search engine ranking
Being ranked in the top 3 organic listings is a goal for many businesses. The majority of traffic will click on the first three listings. Most people don’t want to figure out how search engine algorithms work. Some of the aspects search engines look at are technical. Google’s recent switch to favor secure websites (HTTPS:// versus HTTP://) will have a warning for Chrome users when your site does not have an SSL certificate. This will discourage people from visiting your website.
Give some love to search engines
Search engines love new content. Their mission is to display appropriate content about a search query. You will rank higher because your website is crawled more often. Higher rankings mean more web traffic is being driven to your website. Once you stop updating your website, the crawler will stop indexing your website. Your ranking begins to drop as a result.
Part of maintaining your website is taking a look at how your SEO has been performing. By reviewing your keyword performance, you can keep your website performing well. Dump the keywords that aren’t performing well and review Google Trends and Google Keyword Planners for higher performing keywords. For a more detailed explanation on content ranking, here’s a great article from MOZ: https://moz.com/blog/google-fresh-factor-new.
Keep your website secure
Web sites on a CMS such as WordPress get attacked. Your website doesn’t have to be an e-commerce site to become a victim of hacking. Keeping your website up to date with the latest software, plugins, and themes will help protect your website. It is also important to keep a current backup of your business website, just in case. If Google detects malware on your website, they will delist your site until you get it fixed.
By maintaining your business WordPress website you will:
- give your visitors the best possible impression
- increase traffic to your site
- prevent most attacks from taking your website offline
A basic WordPress maintenance package should include WordPress updates, theme and plugin updates, backups, WordPress security, analytics tracking & reporting, and possibly hosting. Does your existing or new website need fresh content and/or security updates? EMG Design has monthly web maintenance packages that can help you.
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