Website maintenance is that the act of keeping your website up so far, secure, and operating & converting at the best possible level.

There are many areas of a website that require to be maintained, here are some key areas of what to stay up so far and the way to keep up your website:

Platform – If you utilize a platform like WordPress to power your website, then one of the numerous benefits of using WordPress is that it comes with automatic updates to assist you to retain your WordPress platform up to now and nice and secure from hackers.

There are always new security vulnerabilities being found and by keeping your platform up thus far, with WordPress it’s a 1 click process, then it makes maintaining your website a breeze.

If you've got a custom-built website, it's going to be a touch harder to stay your website platform maintained, although built on a core programming languages there are elements of code that may become depreciated and cause security issues so it’s best to talk along with your web developer that.

Security – Tying in with keeping your platform secure there are elements of code that will be protected, and security analysis administrated.
If you have got a WordPress plugin then a plugin like Sucuri will help keep you safe – It also provides logs so you'll see any failed login attacks and block the IP/country that will be attacking you.

You can also check your server logs additionally for similar information and again speak to your web host who can help advise on the way to make your website safer.

There are areas of your server that will be locked down like protecting it from malicious crawling bots, protect folders from malicious uploads, and preventing brute force attacks on your administrator login pages. To mitigate risks and reduce performance-related incidents and outages, perform severe monitoring from time to time.

Speed – A metric employed by Google as a part of their program Algorithm, Page speed is very important for an excellent User Experience and is a few things that will be worked on, on an everyday basis.

There are many different areas of page speed for you to take care of such as:

Coding issues – Poor code can slow your website down
Database – Poor database optimization can slow your site down
Images – having images that are large in file size or dimensions will and is usually the largest reason for slowing websites down.

Luckily speed issues are relatively easy to repair.

Firstly, it’s best to use a tool like www.gtmetrix.com to live the speed and to test their waterfall to work out what’s taking the longest to load – 8 out of 10 times its because of large image file sizes.

To compress your images employing a tool like TinyPNG is extremely advised, this tool will allow you to compress in seconds without losing an excessive amount of quality.

Another thing that might be slowing your website down has too many outgoing connections, this can be basically when your website links to too many images, CSS, JS files, and other third-party scripts like live chats or review widgets, the more of those you've got the more connections your website should connect.

Connections may be easily drilled down by firstly removing any plugins not required and where possible merging your Javascript files to bring the quantity of them down.

If you've got a live chat that you just never use, then consider removing it because it is going to be taking on valuable connections and contributing to a slow load time.

A great plugin to assist with page speed is WP Rocket – This plugin can help reduce the load time, server connections and compress files to enable your website to load faster.

Website maintenance tasks can go further and include general things such as:

-Changing images
-Changing text
-Adding new pages
-Changing prices

Or even bigger things like bolting on new bigger functionality and taking your website to a brand new level.

In very simple terms that’s how you maintain an internet site and a few of the website maintenance services that require a place to make sure your website is efficient.

How much does website maintenance cost?

There are many different website maintenance packages and various costs for website maintenance, so it’s best to talk along with your web designer about ongoing maintenance costs but an affordable level is around $50-$75+ vat per hour so it's very difficult to answer what proportion website maintenance will cost.

Maintenance depends on the precise tasks that you just would want to try to do, so it’s always best to talk before to urge an estimate of hours along with your web agency.

Remember if you have got a tiny low retainer of say 10-20 hours a month along with your website designer then betting on how efficiently that they work those hours can be wont to make some serious improvements to your website – It’s highly unlikely an eCommerce function, for instance, can be bolted on in 10 hours, but maybe a payment gateway could, it’s best to figure things out and plan them beforehand to induce the foremost out of your hours.