While most businesses recognize the importance of having a quality website, not all fully appreciate the importance of its maintenance. The latter fulfils several roles, including that of setting up the conditions ensuring the proper functioning of the site and its referencing.
Maintaining a website: why is it so important?
Technical maintenance and content maintenance
Before going any further, let’s start by specifying that the maintenance of a website touches on two very distinct points: it’s content and its technical elements. If the technical maintenance aims to remedy the various malfunctions that may arise and prevent the proper functioning of the site, the maintenance of the content speaks for itself.
Technical maintenance: its advantages
Avoid problems caused by site migration
Although this does not necessarily happen often in the life of a website, it may be that the transfer from one server to another is necessary due to a change in the type of accommodation, which you use. As the transfer of more data and functionality increases the risk of experiencing problems of all kinds, technical maintenance is of paramount importance in deciding what should be kept from what should be discarded to avoid risk. cause unnecessary problems while transferring your site.
Sort the features
Over time and the evolution of a website’s needs, several features will be added to its architecture to optimize it and thereby improve the user experience. As those which are obsolete are now useless and only unnecessarily overload the site, the maintenance will make it possible to sort out and keep only those that are relevant.
Do you have a website maintenance project in mind?
Avoid errors and malfunctions
Although Google attaches great importance to the value of your content when determining your positioning, you should know that it also judges your website on the technical maintenance that is done and, on the precautions, put in place to avoid the presence of broken links or pages 404. As these turn out to be real nuisances in terms of the user experience, their presence is particularly badly perceived by Google.
The latter could even penalize you by reducing the number of your pages that are indexed. Moreover, it is a safe bet that visitors to your website also hold it against you.
Do you have an e-commerce site? Errors and glitches here and there while browsing will reduce your conversion rate and discourage your site visitors from doing business with you. That’s a compelling argument, isn’t it?
Content maintenance: for better referencing and better visibility
As we briefly mentioned earlier, maintaining a site’s content is updating its content. But why is this update so important? Quite simply because the knowledge and facts that constitute the very foundation of this content are constantly evolving. So, while some of your old articles may have been written with the greatest of rigor, some of their information may need to be updated.
It should be borne in mind that Google’s algorithm attaches great importance to the quality of your content, its relevance, and its updating to determine your positioning on its search engine. Not only will the update of your posts be evaluated, but don’t forget that the addition of articles according to the era of the time as well as the integration of new images or video content will be as well.
In addition, note that all of these improvements will necessarily attract more traffic to you, in addition to making it easier to get backlinks (inbound links).
Maintaining your content, therefore, allows you to offer current and relevant publications to your visitors, in addition to giving you the chance to refine their optimization through the integration of new keywords. Keep in mind that better SEO and content that is both interesting and up-to-date are winning conditions to gain better visibility in the eyes of your target market.