For your business or organization, your website can serve many different purposes. Your website could serve as your digital front door, or even a digital storefront. This will be one of the first impressions you can make on someone if they were to type your company's name into a search engine. When well-optimized, your business can even show to people who are looking up products or services that are relevant to your site.
Like any part of your business, it's important to ensure that your website receives the proper care and attention it deserves. Think about other forms of technology and equipment your business uses, like smartphones, tablets, vehicles, refrigerators, and even security systems. These things all receive proper maintenance and even the occasional replacement to ensure you can keep things up and running, so what about your website?Security & Protection
If you've read our previous blogs on data security, cybersecurity technology, and social engineering, you know that we take business IT security very seriously. Your company's data is vital to its wellbeing and although your website lives on a different server than that data, it is just as important. Even a simple website can become victim to hackers if it is not maintained, ending up costing you time, money, and credibility with potential sales leads.
The only way to ensure that a website is as secure as it can be is to secure it from the outset and regularly update its security systems. Hackers are constantly looking for new backdoors through which they can take control of websites, and regular patching is the best way to try and ensure that any potential backdoors are sealed.Routine Updates
Updating the components that make up your website is vital to not only keeping a usable site online, but also can improve the experience of the users who visit your site. Compare this to some of the other tools your business uses. For example, an outside sales representative might heavily rely on their smartphone to contact clients and remain productive in the field. Imagine if they were still using an older generation smartphone, such as an iPhone 6 or 7. They'd likely have issues like a lack of storage, low battery life, poor reception quality, or even faulty components, like a speaker, camera, or microphone.
Technology is always improving and keeping up with the most recent versions of things like your smartphone, and website, will keep your business ahead of the curve to improve a user's experience. Consistent component or plugin updates add requested features to your existing site's functionality, improve the security of those components or plugins, and interface more efficiently with the other systems that make up your website. Allowing components to stagnate for any period will begin to lead to incompatibilities that will eventually make it impossible to update without performing a full rebuild.
Content Up to Date?
How often do your business processes change? Pricing, descriptions, products carried, menus, and more can shift as the market shifts, and it is important to keep your clients apprised of that information. This has two important effects on your business website: clients will continue to rely on the website for up-to-date information, and search engines will begin to see your business as a reliable source, helping your page ranking.Page content is comprised of all the visual and written elements on your website, be that an "About Us" page listing key players on your team, a blog with industry information, or images of your featured products. By keeping all that information up to date, your website can easily become as trusted and reliable as the person at the front desk and can contribute to increased sales and an improved reputation.
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