With the increasing necessity of having a website in today’s business world, most people have come to take it as a given. You just can’t have a business if you don’t have a website. With some notable exceptions.
This is good. But the upshot is, since everyone needs one but not everyone wants to make the investment to have it maintained professionally, what often ends up happening is that business owners just maintain their sites themselves.
This may be fine, depending on your level of technical prowess. But we feel there are some compelling arguments to get a professional to maintain your website. Here are just a few of them to mull over in your mind.
#1: It’s a major time saver
Maintaining a website is complicated. There are multiple facets to keep in mind, including updates to themes and plugins, system updates, security, performance, backups, and analytics.
All of this ends up being very time consuming – so time consuming in fact, that it justifies constituting a full-time position. If you attempt to take care of it yourself, that’s valuable time you should be spending on the oversight of other areas of your business, which could suffer from your divided attention.
#2: The quality will be better
There’s another upshot of dividing your attention. With all the other work you have to do to run your business, it’s easy to let some of the above aspects of web management fall by the wayside, or do a less than stellar job at them.
Just as other areas of your business require a dedicated team of qualified experts, such as HR or R&D, it’s necessary to have a web management team on hand to make sure the job is getting done right, which is large reason it is important to have on our list of 6 reasons you should hire a professional to maintain your website. After all, your web presence is too invaluable an element of your overall marketing plan not to take the best possible care of.
#3: It’s cost-effective
This may seem counter-intuitive; a likely reason why you would avoid hiring a professional is that you don’t want to spend extra money.
But ultimately, the cost of hiring a team to keep your website running smoothly will be well worth it to avoid crashes, delays due to out-of-date software or failure to serve your clients. This could lead to you losing the confidence of your clients and losing business, which may end up costing you money.
Ultimately, you could find yourself spending more to bring on an employee and pay them by the hour. Better to just hire a team of professional web designers, content developers and managers to do it the right way, the first time.
#4: You’d be taking a risk
Given the investment it takes to create a website in the first place, it’s a pretty big gamble to take on the task of managing it yourself.
Say you make an investment in a good, stylish, and reliable car – would you then handle all the work of a mechanic yourself, or take it to a professional?
Even if you’re an amateur web manager of sorts, and even if you can do a serviceable job yourself, there’s still the matter of the time commitment involved in upkeep of the website. Instead of letting the quality of the site devolve overtime, and the investment you made in it on the outset go to waste, the responsible thing would be to leave it in the capable hands of professionals.
#5: It’s more secure
One of the foremost tasks of web managers is making sure the security of your website remains airtight and intact. This is especially important if you process or store any sensitive personal information from your users.
Maintaining the integrity of your site security is an involved process, which includes monitoring the site for suspicious activity, updating security keys, regularly changing the default admin user account, managing login duration, and more.
As with the overall enterprise of website maintenance, this is a full-time job, and demands not only professional expertise but time. Hiring professionals to handle it is a no-brainer.
#6: Your website will perform better
The final element on our list of 6 reasons you should hire a professional to maintain your website is crucial. Website managers also focus on optimizing your site’s performance. They do this by prioritizing SEO, “minifying” all the assets of your site to improve your pages’ load speed, page/browser caching, etc.
The improved quality of bringing experts onto the scene won’t just be apparent from an aesthetic point of view. You will also see the results in terms of the increased traffic you’ll receive and consequently the greater business that will flow your way due to having a site that’s performing at peak levels.
All in all, there’s simply no substitute for having a team of trained professionals handling all the day to day work of maintaining, protecting and continually building your site. And there’s nothing like having the team that built your site to start with, that knows all its ins and outs better than anyone else, continuing that work and carrying the stamp of excellence for as long as your site is live. That’s why 6Ninety9 dedicates itself to offering those services to all our clients. Visit our homepage for a consultation to learn more.
