10 Reasons You Need Website Support Services

How Website Support Services Work

If you bought the latest luxury vehicle, would you follow the dealer’s recommended guidelines for maintenance, or would you just ignore them, leave it unmaintained, and hope for the best? Of course not, because we always try to protect our investments and follow the advice of professionals. Your website is no different, which is why you need website support services.

By working with a company that provides professional website support services, you get a team of programmers, developers, and webmasters dedicated to keeping your website running smoothly. Going back to my analogy of the luxury car, getting pro web support is more akin to having an entire race car team working on your website at once, rather than just one technician looking under the hood. Best of all, the monthly cost is much more affordable than hiring a new member of your team to do the same.

What Are Website Support Services?

Any act of keeping your website running smoothly, operational, updated, secure, and fast loading, that is done on a regular schedule is defined as a website support service. This is crucial in providing your visitors with consistently pleasant user experience, thus increasing the likelihood that they will conduct business with you or browse for longer.

If you prefer to be proactive and reduce the possibilities of major issues that may crash your website, cause loss of data or allow hacking/security breaches, you need a team to react quickly to resolve these issues and prevent them from happening in the future.

If things are still somewhat unclear for you, I have compiled a list of the 10 best reasons why you need website support and maintenance Below.

10 Reasons For Website Support Services:

1 – Keep Your Website Online

A website, no matter how beautiful, fast, or SEO optimized, is useless if it is offline or broken when people try to visit. Every second your website remains offline you lose money. A good webmaster will implement many strategies to keep you online such as making regular backups, implementing caching, installing intuitive coming soon or maintenance pages, work on updates offline before going live, and so on.

2 – Focus On Your Business

Chances are you are not a website expert with hours available to comb through your website looking for issues to fix. You are more likely to be an expert in running your own business, whether it be an e-commerce or brick and mortar store, a travel agency, blogging, etc. Getting professional website support services allows you to focus on running your business and concentrate your precious time, energy, and attention there.

3 – Timely System Updates

If you are using a CMS such as WordPress, Magento, or Joomla, then you will have to do frequent plug-in and theme updates to keep your website secure and prevent it from breaking. There are frequent security updates that fix critical errors or vulnerabilities in each CMS. Most websites store some form of data for their visitors, and you have a responsibility to keep this information secure with system updates.

While crucial, some system updates may conflict with other elements of your website and cause it to break. This is exactly why it is always advised to leave updates, especially of larger plugins and your entire theme to the experts.

4 – Adding New Content

Most websites are updated frequently with new content such as blog posts, articles, products, etc. The average business owner will not know how to properly format these pieces of content for their website; therefore, they need professional webmasters to upload content regularly. Even content that was created years ago may need to be updated with new information.

5 – Search Engine Optimization Tweaks

SEO Is ever-changing, which means your website and content needs to be updated regularly to keep up with Google and other search engines. Some websites are plagued by usability errors, mobile issues, broken links, and the like.

You do not want to gamble with your SEO especially when it brings you revenue, and just one of the issues mentioned previously will cause your rankings to plummet if left unchecked.

Your web support team should be monitoring these variables, and quickly fix any SEO issues that arise.

6 – Auditing & Discovery

Before beginning to work on your web support, an audit should be conducted to see if your website is functioning as it should, and if not, what the offending issues are. This audit will also allow your support team to identify any opportunities available to improve your website.

7 – Speed Up Your Website

Most visitors ‘dip’ from a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Most web designers love making websites as flashy and pretty as possible, neglecting the fact that these enhancements tend to make your website slow down dramatically. This is even more unfortunate, since most visitors just want to access your information, and care little if at all about the visuals, (provided your website does not look horrible and broken).

Testing your speed and implementing or suggesting ways on how to increase it is a crucial part of website support services.

8 – Support In Real-Time

Most webmasters worthy of being paid will provide you with support in real-time so that they are available via phone, live chat, email, and/or tickets. The great ones will offer support 24 hours daily.

9 – Backups & Restore

Most businesses, especially the virtual ones rely on their website and the content contained within to earn, or at a minimum provide information to their clients. Some websites cost between hundreds to millions of dollars just to be made, to say nothing of the many hours spent on copywriting, editing, and researching, only to lose it in an instant.

Your entire website should be backed up regularly so that it can be quickly restored in the event of any major issues.

10 – Monitoring And Reporting Your Stats

Do you know how many visitors you had on your website last week? Whether they came from Google, Bing, Facebook, or your mailing list? What your top 3 visited pages are? If the answer to these questions is yes, then congrats, you are on the right path. If not, then you should take the necessary steps to ensure you can answer these questions confidently by tomorrow. Providing you with these stats should be a basic component of any website support services package.

By monitoring your analytics, your webmaster can see how your visitors interact with your website and the average time people interact with a page. For example, if you have a blog that used to get an average viewing time of around 5 minutes, but in the last 2 weeks the average has plummeted to under a minute, then chances are the blog is broken and needs to be fixed.

In Conclusion

As covered extensively in the list above, any business serious about having their website fully functional for their visitors and preventing the loss of data, time, and money needs to invest in professional website support services as soon as possible. All my websites are managed by our team at VIMSCO, as I have known the pain of getting hacked through old plugins and losing LOTS of money and business. That is the primary reason I wrote this piece, to help prevent my readers from suffering the same fate.

Interested In Getting Professional Website Support Services Today?

If you are, feel free to email us at [email protected] and we can help you get started, or at least guide you on how to choose other agencies who know what they are doing. You can also subscribe to our mailing list below from updates and more blog posts like these.[/text]