Maintenance

Treat Your Website the Way You Treat Your Automobile

I showed how many websites there are in the world under the “Bit About Websites” in the DIY tab. Once your website is built then comes SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Without SEO your domain will be worthless.

Along with SEO comes maintenace, which is more important than many think or realize. If you don’t keep your site clean it will crash and if you want people to view your site it must be fast. People don’t spend much time with a sluggish website.

As I briefly explained in the DIY tab, it’s very important how a website is structured.

To keep visitors interested I would say the main factors are:

Content
Navigation
White Space
Color

Everything I say on this page is due to things I’ve learned throughout the years. Yet, that doesn’t mean everything I say is correct, but I believe it and it works for me.

Here’s a site I think is informative in regards to website maintenance. I don’t agree with everything they say, but neither do I disagree. I see some things that aren’t necessary anymore due to the quickly growing technology of the internet and there’s a bit of fluff. But if you are going to build your website and maintain it this is a good article to read.

A website is not the same as, let us say, a painting that after it is finished you hang it somewhere to look at. A website is a machine and to make sure it achieves its purpose maintenance is essential.

In 2023, there were 1.13 billion websites on the internet. However, only a bit over 200 million were actively maintained and visited. This means that only 18% of the websites were seen.

Why is this? To be honest, I don’t know for certain. But I have an idea, I have to say it is due to one and/or two reasons:

The website didn’t have proper maintenance and
Improper SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Many perform the needed maintenance to keep the site functioning but they only do the basics of SEO. I used to be like that simply because SEO/Schema/Snippet are tedious jobs.

A Website is a Website is a Website

A well-designed website is necessary if you want to rank on Google or any search engine. This is where SEO is prominent.

Many website owners hire web designers to maintain their sites. This can be expensive.

It doesn’t matter if your website is e-commerce, a blog, personal, educational, or any type, if you don’t maintain it then it will crash. If you don’t change the oil in your car or keep the cables clean what happens? Same thing.

The Automobile and Your Website

A simple comparison of a website is the automobile. The automobile is mainly used for travel, but can also be used for small storage.

Each website stores many different things, such as information, sales, communication, etc., and transports it all around the world. How fast and far the transportation takes it will depend on the power of the host that is being used and the structure of the site itself.

For an automobile to continue to function properly maintenance is necessary. It needs the proper type of gasoline to start, but for it to perform at its peak the oil must be changed regularly, the proper amount of air must be in the tires, transmission fluid must be kept, cables, such as the battery, must be clean, etc.

Never Free

Maintenance is never free, even if you do it yourself. Just like an automobile. Website maintenance costs can range from $35 to $5,000 per month or $18 to $25 per hour. The exact cost depends on the type of website.

If you look online you’ll find many different costs. At the time of this writing, below are two different tables from two different companies that are very similar.

The first one is from Hostinger, a service that provides the space to store and transmit data for websites and the other one is from WebFX, a digital marketing agency.

Web Type	Monthly Website Mainteance Cost
Personal Website	$5-$25/mo
Professional Blog	$25-$75/mo
Small to Medium Business Website	$35-$500/mo
Multimedia Entertainment Website	$300-$2,500/mo
Corporate Website	$200-$4,500/mo
E-Commerce Website	$750-$5,000/mo

Web Type	Monthly Website Mainteance Cost
Personal Website	$5-$25/mo
Professional Blog	$25-$75/mo
Small Business Website	$35-$100/mo
SMB Businesst Website	$125-$500/mo
Corporate Website	$200-$3,500/mo
Web Application	$300-$2,500/mo
Custom Business Website	$350-$4,500/mo
E-Commerce Website	$1,500-$2,500/mo
Custom E-Commerce Website	$750-$5,000/mo

What is and is Not Considered Maintenance

The above tables show what maintenance tools make for a great website, but not everything listed is basic maintenance.

The primary goal of doing maintenance, aside from just keeping it running, is the search engine results pages (SERPs), but SEO IS NOT maintenance, but a NEED.

A lot of freelancers and even companies will give you a huge list that really isn’t maintenance. They just want you to think they’re doing more for you than they are so they can charge you more.

The first three tabs shown below are maintenance. The last three are important, but not needed for your site to function properly, which is what maintenance is.

Web development companies create and regularly update software plugins so you can keep your site safe from hackers, malware, spam, and other cyber threats. There are many and some are expensive, but most individuals can use the free ones.

Security is a plugin, but I listed it here because this is a MUST-HAVE plugin.

Most plugins that the average person needs are free. Most of them do have a pro-version but are not necessary. Yet, it depends on what type of plugin it is. All plugins must be updated whenever there is an update, and that can be daily. If a plugin is not updated it can cause your entire site to crash.

Some plugin developers don’t update and at times it will cause problems, sometimes serious problems, and when it does you have to change the brand of the plugin.

I explain more about this in the “Hosts & Theme” tab. Themes aren’t updated as much as plugins. There are a lot of themes out there that are free, but most of them, no matter how good they look, are a bad idea. A free one can cause problems and there’s not much to them.

Yet, there are a few good free ones, such as Astra, Generatepress, and OceanWP.

I have used Generatepress because it is lightweight and good for any project.
Of the three, I prefer Astra because it is extremely fast and works well with Elementor Pro.
I tried OceanWP and it is good, but it isn’t as user-friendly as the others.

A good theme has the following:

Mobile-responsive design: The theme designs are responsive and retina-ready, so your WordPress website looks great on all screen sizes and mobile devices. Nowadays, most, not all, themes have that.
SEO optimization: The theme follows the best SEO (search engine optimization) practices so your website can rank higher in search results.
Page builder support: The theme is compatible with popular WordPress drag-and-drop page builders. This helps you create any pages.
Speed and performance: Your theme plays an important role in the speed and performance of your website.Customer support: This isn’t available unless you pay for the pro-version.

Many will call it maintenance, but it’s not. Yet, your site needs to be backed up but if you use a plugin like UpdraftPlus or WP Vivid Backup, as many companies do, you can set it so it will back your site up whenever you schedule it to do so and all you have to do is check and make sure it is working.

Also, nowadays, any good host backs your site up, but you want a backup plugin.

Many will call this “SEO Monitoring” as part of the maintenance, but this is not so. SEO (search engine optimization) is not maintenance, it would fit in more with Content.

Many call Performance Optimization a part of maintenance and it isn’t, but it’s sort of a part of SEO, but more involved with the Cache.

Content is very important to get your site on page one of the search engine, and SEO plays a big role in this. Google likes it when you add new content. Google also likes blogs.

Whether your site is just a blog, a store, or any type of website with a blog, IF you add new content to it at least three days a week, preferably every day, Google’s spiders will rank it and your site will move up on the hierarchy of websites.

Let us say you have a store and add a blog to it. You don’t have to do anything to your store, as long as the blog is connected to it

Built the Way You Like It

Lifetime Maintenance

No Upfront Cost

Maintenance

Treat Your Website the Way You Treat Your Automobile