One of the most common complaints so many web developers and maintenance teams encounter is regarding performance. What typically happens is that a business has a website developed for them and in the first few months it performs admirably. Then, somewhere along the line, they notice traffic is slowing down, conversions are not what they once were and the bounce rate is through the roof. Lacking ongoing maintenance, performance suffers more with each passing month until they approach the web development team with a complaint that their site just isn’t working.
Correcting a Common Misunderstanding
What many business owners failed to understand is that a website must be continually monitored and maintained to ensure it continues to rank and perform well. Bear in mind that the web crawlers continue to look for new SEO content, working links, low bounce rates, and yes, high volumes of organic traffic. Lest we forget the importance of mobile viewers, responsive websites are an important factor as well.
Website maintenance is actually rooted in analytics that will indicate the main areas of concern. These are the issues that a website maintenance service seeks to identify and correct with the benefits being optimal performance in those key areas. Let’s look at a few of those benefits now.
Highest Levels of Security
Website maintenance is important on literally any commercial website, but when it comes to an industry responsible for capturing sensitive personal information, it is all the more important. For just a moment, think of all the personal identifying information that is held on a law firm’s inhouse computer network.
A website lacking the latest security layers can leave a hole in the backdoor through which hackers can access all that data on the firm’s mainframe. It should go without saying that everything a law firm does is based on information and, once breached, that could have devastating effects on so many people. Website security is paramount and should take precedence over almost any of the other services provided.
Higher Conversion Rates
When it comes to a law firm’s website, conversion typically refers to completed contact forms resulting in an initial appointment with the firm. It could also be phone calls to the firm to set an appointment or any query passed through. While you wouldn’t ordinarily expect a retainer fee to be paid online, the ‘conversion’ refers to that call to action, resulting in further contact.
Optimisation of Page Load Times
There are few things that frustrate visitors more than slow-loading web pages. Quite often the visitor will tire of waiting for a page to load and will bounce back off the site again and on to the next link on the search engine results page, SERP. Bounce rate can have a negative impact on your law firm’s ranking with Google, and if something isn’t done to correct the underlying issues, you can expect to continue losing rank, making it much harder to be found by prospective new clients.
Repairing Broken Links
Another thing Google hates just as much as consumers do would be those 404: Page Not Found errors. This is something a legal team probably wouldn’t notice and unless they have access to the CMS (Content Management System) they probably couldn’t get in to correct the link either. Not only will you lose rank, making it even more difficult for searchers to find you, but it may frustrate them enough that they wouldn’t come back when those links were corrected.
So then, the benefits are what you hope to realise whereas the analytics, corrections, and updates are why you need an experienced website maintenance team on the job month after month. Website maintenance is never a one and done deal.
