In order for websites to run properly and stay secure, they require updating. If your site is not operating properly, then important items on your site (i.e. contact info, info about your company, products or services, etc.) may be unavailable to any visitors to your site. This is no good since the online “front door” for your patients and their needs is your website.
Here at Functional Medicine SEO, we offer monthly website maintenance to our offices because we know that when things break on their site, it affects their ability to schedule new patients. We’ll cover what you need to know about maintenance in this article.
The Importance Of Running Website Updates
What are website updates? Good question because a lot of people think updates mean switching out images or content. Rather, a good comparison for website updates would be like updating your phone. How often do you update it? And if not updated, what happens? Well, it runs extremely slow, sometimes shuts off without warning, etc. Right?
The major difference between your site and your phone is that when your site goes down, it stops providing you with new patients. That equals time and money, both of which can be extremely costly to a practice and its patients.
Maintaining Your Website
Some things you will want to keep in mind when thinking of website maintenance include backups, security scans, and page speeds. Backups are important because it allows anything new to your site to be saved if anything goes wrong.
Security scans help protect you from any malicious attacks or potentially vulnerable areas of your site. And page speeds allow your site to load and run at a speed that allows your site to rank with Google.
Another important part of maintaining your website involves keeping it running and up. If your site goes offline, then you are essentially standing still. Think of it like a race. Everyone else around you will be moving at progressive speeds while you are simply standing right in the middle of all of it and doing nothing. Not very productive, huh?
Not only does a website that is offline keeps people from finding you, but it also affects your SEO. If Google comes by and tries to visit your site, but it’s down, it will set your site back significantly. When we see a site is down, we go fix it immediately because it will ruin our SEO campaign.
Potential Risks Of Not Maintaining Your Website
If your website isn’t kept up to date, it can begin to run slow and become glitchy. And if your website’s visitors or patients are frequently leaving your site soon after arriving on it, Google may begin to view it as not relevant. And once your ranking begins to fall, so will your traffic.
Another potential risk is your website may also be prone to hacks. Regular maintenance helps prevent this. Some maintenance plans even offer brute force monitoring, which will alert admins of hackers attempting an attack on your website. And with functional medicine doctor practices, much of the stored online information is highly sensitive, so hackers would represent a huge threat here.
The final risk is that your website can crash and die. Yes, websites can die and be impossible to bring back up. When things become too outdated (themes, plugins, core files, etc.), your website is more prone to crashing. Crashing could mean the loss of sensitive and valuable data and information such as patient files, histories, plans, etc.
Contact Us Today For Website Maintenance
The good news is that all of the above-mentioned issues and hazards can be maintained by having someone work on your website monthly. If you are in need of someone to help you maintain your website, please contact the team here at Functional Medicine SEO for a free strategy session. Our SEO experts are here to help.
