You get your car serviced, why do you neglect your website?

Many of my clients mistakenly assume their website is maintained as part of their hosting service.

While this is true to the extent that it’s kept live and running, quite significant components are not included in a hosting plan and remain untouched, sometimes for many years. Go ahead, ask any hosting service, they’ll tell you the same thing.

In the past I have regularly attended to errors, often unwittingly created by the client and written it off as part of the service. While I can absorb this to a small degree, these issues sometimes require lengthy investigation and repair work. At some point I have to set the meter running. The resulting bill can be an unpleasant surprise.

Quite a lot of my clients are in businesses that charge for their time, so when I point out I have spent two or three hours repairing their site, they begin to appreciate the enormity of the problem.

So with a view to reduce those unexpected bills and the need for me to drop what I’m doing to perform repairs, I’ve begun offering website maintenance packages for a monthly fee, based on the level of support required.

Any website utilises server software that is regularly updated for performance and security reasons, so a website needs to stay in sync.

For example, with a WordPress site, the core needs to be kept up to date, as do plugins and the theme itself. Neglect these things and the site will begin to experience errors, often without the owner’s knowledge, until it finally trips over. Or, your website’s loading speed can suffer turning visitors away.

And some clients simply never update their content. I fully understand the difficulty with finding the time, but you need to make the effort, it is irresponsible and portrays a sloppy attitude to visitors.

If you really can’t make the time, hand it over to someone who can. It astonishes me that people will willingly fork out for every other business expense without question, rent, electricity, printed advertising, even thousands of dollars for computer software to a price gouging multi-national corporation, but expect their website to run on the smell of an oily rag.

Here’s a challenge, if you have a website with a CMS, log into the back end and see if there are any prompts to update, or error messages. Than get in touch with your hosting company and ask them if website maintenance and updates are included in the subscription fee.

You have your car serviced because you don’t want it to fail when you need it, your website is no different in that regard.