A New Website Is Like A New Car…Maintenance Can Go A Long Way
So you’ve got a new website. That’s awesome. Congrats! I truly hope you’re happy with it regardless of if we built it or another company did. Here’s the thing though. A website is a lot like a new car. At first your new car runs really well. It looks spectacular! You can’t wait to show it to your family, friends and colleagues. Then a little bit of time goes by. You get your first scratch. The electric windows work sometimes. You’re 9,000 miles past your last oil change and various other things that you know you should take care of, but life is busy and you choose not to take care of the maintenance of the car.
How is a website like a new car? Much like that new car a similar scenario happens. At first the site looks and works great. You’re happy t to share it with friends, colleagues and maybe family. Then work gets busy. You decide to hold off on updating the site itself, the back-end. You might decide to not update plugins or modules, some of the infrastructure. Even worse, you don’t update your content. So what happens? The site starts to show it’s age and you no longer want to show it off. It slows down and may not work on some devices. We’ve had some clients come to us and admit that they’re embarrassed of their site. If you’re embarrassed of your site or you know you’ve neglected it, what do you think your potential customer thinks?
Your website is your online presence. If it looks bad or operates poorly, your potential customer will look for another company unless your company is one of the few companies that are the only company to offer that particular product or service. Consider this as well. They come to your website anonymously. There is no interaction between you and the potential customer for you to be able to better “sell” them your product(s) or service(s). You usually only get 1-2 chances.
What should you do? Just like your new car when you change the oil, follow the scheduled maintenance and such you have a car that will serve you for a longer amount of time. The same things goes with your. Make sure you keep do the website maintenance by keeping it updated which includes the back-end, the infrastructure and the content itself!