Investing in the long-term success and credibility of your website

Your website is one of your institution’s most valuable assets. It’s often the first impression prospective students, faculty, and stakeholders have of your brand. But launching a great site is just the beginning. Thoughtfully managing its security, performance, and content over time is what ensures its lasting impact. 

Maintaining a website is a bit like tending to a garden — it requires regular care and attention to flourish. Your site is no different: Ongoing support and maintenance are the invisible hands that will keep your web presence thriving. We asked our digital experiences director to talk about why it’s so important to invest in what is considered the front door of your institution. 

Why It Matters

1. Safeguarding Security

Just as you lock your doors at night, your website needs protection from digital intruders. Even the most secure sites have gaps that can be exploited if you’re not paying attention. Make sure you have a support team in place that is monitoring for security threats and is making regular updates to your CMS, plug-ins, and hosting platform. This will defend you against potential threats, ensuring that your data stays safe from harm.

2. Optimizing Performance 

You can design and build the best site ever, but until you release it into the real world, it’s impossible to truly know how well it will perform. Monitor your site analytics, and continue to watch your user behavior. By keeping a vigilant eye here, your web support team can take steps to optimize the site’s performance and keep your site running smoothly and quickly — delivering an engaging experience that converts users.

3. Content Continuity

You have to keep the fresh content coming. If you want your site to keep ranking well in Google and keep reaching your users, it’s not enough to just change the banners on the home page. Fresh, relevant content is key to continually performing well. By regularly publishing new content and making updates to your existing content, you’ll not only engage your audience, but you’ll also signal to search engines that your site is active and worth ranking.

4. Preventing Downtime Disasters

Glitches happen: There’s no way to avoid them. But an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. A crash can spell disaster for your website. Ongoing support means having backup systems in place and experts on standby to swiftly address any issues, minimizing downtime and keeping your operations running smoothly.

Key Components

Here’s what your web maintenance team should be doing to keep your website healthy and performing at its best.

1. Platform Updates

With regular updates to your CMS and plug-ins, you’ll ensure that your website remains secure and compatible with the latest technologies. These updates can help protect you against security breaches, but they can also add new functionality to your site. This in turn can lead to more efficient paths through your conversion funnel, and a more engaging user experience.

2. Backup and Recovery

Backups are simple and easy to overlook, but they’re a vital part of any support plan. When the worst happens — say your site gets hacked, or a system failure wipes out your data — you need to recover quickly, and backups are how you do it. Routine backups provide a safety net in these scenarios, so you can restore your site quickly and minimize disruptions. Daily backups are best, but at a minimum, ensure that backups are taken weekly, and keep them for at least a month. To ensure a successful recovery, store your backups in an environment that’s completely independent from your site.

3. Security Monitoring

Platform updates and site backups are great steps to preventing and recovering from security breaches. But you still need to be vigilant — the most secure system ever can still have weaknesses. Through continuous monitoring for suspicious activities and vulnerabilities, you can help identify and address potential security threats before they escalate into major issues. If you can catch a problem as it’s happening, you can stop it and recover faster.

4. Performance Enhancement

A slow site is a dead site. Your users’ attention span is fleeting, so you need to deliver your content as quickly as possible. With every new functionality and browser update, new opportunities arise to improve the efficiency of your site. Ongoing site maintenance gives you the opportunity for a feedback loop, where you can optimize, monitor, test, and optimize again. Optimization never stops — and it gives you the tools to improve your load times and user experience, enhancing your site’s overall effectiveness.

Choosing the Right Support Plan

Before your new site goes live, take stock of what you know needs to happen once you press the “go” button. What capacity does your internal team have to make content revisions? Can your IT team make code and functionality updates to your CMS, your plug-ins, and your theme? Does your hosting platform provide security monitoring? 

Next, consider the complexity of your website, your budget, and the level of service you require. Then talk to the team that built your site. A good partner will have built a site that empowers you to work with it, not through them. Most companies that build sites will provide ongoing support and maintenance plans, so if you have a good working relationship with them, talk to them. They should be able to tell you what your opportunities are and where you should focus your efforts. 

Conclusion

Your website is more than just a collection of pages — it’s the digital face of your organization. By investing in ongoing support and maintenance, you’re investing in the long-term success and credibility of your website. So, don’t overlook the importance of these essential behind-the-scenes tasks. They’re the key to unlocking your website’s full potential.