TL;DR: Website management services cover the ongoing security, content management, and general support for your website—and they are fundamental to maintain a healthy web presence.
- What do web management services involve?
- Website security
- Content management
- Website support
- Can I do it on my own?
Business owners put a lot of time and effort into designing their website. From ensuring your branding is accurately represented to providing easy access to purchases, this is a crucial phase in establishing your business.
But what happens next?
There is a common idea that once they’re live, websites will take care of themselves. Yet the fact is that they aren’t static assets that are fixed in time after the design process is over. They require constant work to ensure that they are able to withstand external threats, maintain performance, and adapt as your business changes.
What do website management services involve?
In general, web management services are about having a professional that you trust to take care of your website or provide you with unbiased advice when necessary.
Achieving this involves monitoring every aspect of your website on an ongoing basis to ensure its health and performance. If your website was a car, it would be a matter of regularly checking the oil, replacing the brake lights, tuning up the engine, or doing whatever is necessary to keep your vehicle in top running order.
That said, website management isn’t a vague check up to see if anything happens to be wrong. Proper website care follows a systematic approach to proactively deal with everything from security to content management to ongoing website support, and more.
To give you a better understanding of what this means, we’ll run through some of the tasks involved.
Website security
This is perhaps the most significant aspect of website management. Maintaining the ongoing resilience and protection of your website is crucial to keep your customers’ trust, protect everyone’s data, and secure your business’s overall safety.
We’ve spoken before about the importance of website security for business owners. The fact remains that all websites are constantly under attack and expert attention is needed to fully protect it.
With proper web management services, your firewalls and other general security best practices aren’t just in place and forgotten about, but are actively monitored and maintained. This covers everything from running frequent scans, ensuring your website architecture when necessary, and creating regular backups in case of an emergency.
Content management
Your business changes little by little, day by day. If the content on your website doesn’t reflect this at all times, you could be putting off potential customers. As products or services change, you need to update your website and remove any out-of-date content that could frustrate visitors.
What’s more, content management has a direct impact on your SEO performance. In fact, a reported 57% of marketing executives say developing on-page content development was the most effective tactic in achieving SEO results. With a content management service, everything from uploading fresh blog posts and updating photographs to fixing broken elements on web pages, and more, can be taken care of for you.
Website support
Website support essentially covers any activities that don’t directly impact the content or security. You may need to tweak the navigation of your website or have forgotten your password and need access. There may be some underlying code issues that need to be dealt with.
But beyond the bits and pieces where you need technical expertise, website support also involves the tracking, performance, and data elements of your website.
Even when you have a good hosting provider, it’s possible for your website to go offline and monitoring this is an essential part of web management services. Same goes for Google Analytics and general performance metrics, which is crucial data to keep an eye on for business success.
But all these individual aspects of support add up to one overarching benefit—peace of mind. It’s like having an odd-job person you call on whenever there’s an issue with your home or hiring an accountant to make sure your taxes are done right.
Can I do it on my own?
Many people choose to take control of their own website management, and this is certainly an option—if you have the time and patience. That said, since website management covers so much ground, it’s a challenge to effectively stay on top of every aspect while also running a successful business.
Would you know what to do if something went wrong? It can often take more money to fix mistakes or deal with incomplete backups than the cost of a website care plan for an entire year.
As we mentioned before, the idea of a website care plan isn’t only to take care of security, software updates, backups, error monitoring, content updates, code updates, and everything else. It’s also the most effective way to reduce the time and stress involved with your website, and ensure your visitors always get the best experience possible.
If you’d like to find out more about the website management services we offer at Watchdog Studio, reach out anytime!
