Most small businesses are reactive when it comes to handling websites issues. They respond to problems when they arise, rather than taking steps to prevent those problems in the first place.
While handling problems promptly is important, there is a better way to maintain your site: Using professional website support to keep issues from occurring.
While no website professional can keep you from experiencing any problems at all with your website, good website support can catch many issues before they affect your website, and your visitors.
Here is a look at some of the problems professionals like Distinct can help you to avoid.
Broken Pages
504 errors and broken pages are some of the easiest ways to lose visitors to your website.
While you can fix those broken pages, it is harder to woo back visitors who went looking for your competitors while your page was out of commission.
Web support professionals can prevent this problem by conducting regular checks of all of your pages and links, particularly after updates to your site.
These checks can identify broken links and pages caused by the update before the site goes live again, allowing you to ensure a perfectly working website for your visitors.
And, while no one can completely prevent broken pages, regular inspections of your site can discover and repair errors far more quickly than if you had waited for someone to complain about not being able to access part of your site.
Security Breaches
Security breaches can cost small businesses thousands, or even tens of thousands, of dollars an hour. Even a prompt repair of the breach can leave your small business in the red.
The most cost-effective way of handling security issues is to prevent them with the help of professional website support.
Your support team can take steps to strengthen your security and stop hacking attempts before you lose data by undertaking some of the following tasks:
- Regular upgrades of your plugins and apps
- Creation and implementation of strong password and permissions policies
- Replacing outdated or neglected plugins
- Obtaining an SSL certificate
- Improving code or developing custom code
- Creating encrypted connections
- Managing your WordPress database
- And more
Outdated Content
Ideally, you should add content to your website on a regular basis in order to keep visitors engaged and to appeal to search engines when they are deciding how to rank you in the search results.
Outdated information can create unhappy visitors and affect your search rankings. No one wants, for example, to see an events calendar with events that happened 3 months ago, or check out a blog that hasn't been updated in a month.
Web support professionals can help you with the following aspects of keeping your website fresh:
- Update your event calendar
- Identify and remove/update outdated content
- Refresh your About Us pages
- Maintain your contact information
- Check for form functionality and relevance
- Implement branding updates
- And more
The right business, such as Distinct, can even help you to create copy on a regular basis so your website feels fresh and informative every time visitors stop by.
Outdated Design
Web design trends are always changing, so your website needs to change regularly, too. Usually, you need to refresh your web design every couple of years, but you may require smaller tweaks more frequently.
Your web support professionals can help by keeping an eye on the latest trends and implementing updates when necessary. This does not mean that your site will change every time a new web design fad appears.
What it does mean is that your professional web support company can help you do some of the following for your site:
- Refresh your site when required
- Maintain updated and seasonal imagery
- Update product photos
- Update testimonials
- Refresh any sliders on your homepage
- Ensure intuitive navigation
- Implement updated branding imagery when required
- Create landing pages
- Add special events, promotions, and announcements to your home page
- Create blog pages for new content
- And more
With the right web support professionals, you can enjoy a modern, updated site that visitors are happy to explore.
Data Loss
Weather, hacking, and human error can all lead to the loss of critical data for your business and cost you huge amounts of time and money.
Your website support business may not be able to prevent a tornado or stop your staff member from hitting the wrong button, but they can keep your data safe with regular backups.
Daily, weekly, and monthly backups that store your data on the cloud ensure that you have that data available when you need it.
Your web support company can keep that data secure and then restore it for your site if you encounter an emergency.
The result is the safe, fast, restoration of website data that can get you up and running again quickly even after an unexpected issue.
Preventing small problems from becoming major issues is one of the biggest reasons to hire professionals to handle your website support. Having access to assistance when you encounter a problem is critical, but it is even better never to encounter the problem at all.
Here at Distinct, we can help you to manage your website from design to maintenance. We can prevent and repair broken pages, outdated content, outdated design, data loss, and more. We also focus on building a strong and secure website from the ground up so you are less likely to encounter problems once your site is up and running.
If you want a secure, strong website and the support you need to keep it that way, let us know. We look forward to helping your small business thrive!
