Why pay to maintain a website?
When your website is working, why would you pay anyone to keep it that way?
Well, the short answer is because it’s both cheaper and better than letting it fail or trying to look after it yourself, that’s why!
This is a question that often comes up, because it can be hard to see the value of a maintenance plan when you already have a working website. You’re happy with what’s there. And if it breaks – there’s always Google. Why would you need someone retained to look after it? Can’t you just contact someone to help you out of a hole if something particularly bad happens?
The analogy I tend to use is this.
Imagine your website as a self-driving truck that’s constantly touring the world promoting and selling what you do. Even the simplest truck has a lot of moving parts, and every one of these needs maintenance.
Could you save money in the short term by not maintaining your truck? By not putting oil in it, servicing it, replacing worn tyres and brake pads, and making sure it’s OK to be on the roads? Or even by trying to do some of it yourself? Er, sure, but there are some obvious downsides!
- Is it actually running at all? It’s self-driving, after all. How do you know if it’s even on the road and doing its thing? Or if it’s broken down by the side of the road? You could be losing customers, and even losing reputation when people see it broken there.
- Is it still doing the right thing? OK you originally programmed your truck to seek out customers in a thriving area, but what if that area’s not busy any more? And new areas have opened up that you’re not making the most of? It’s a wasted investment having a truck that’s not getting you customers.
- And is it running optimally? Is your truck moving so slowly that your customers get bored waiting for it? You don’t want to lose custom to the shinier, faster trucks that are newer on the block.
- Is it still secure? Things change really fast in the world of computers. Without regularly updating your security it’s pretty much like leaving your precious van with the engine running and the windows open. It’s an invitation for it to be hijacked, with potentially disastrous results for you and your customers.
- Oh no, it’s gone wrong now! If you wait until your van’s actually broken, then (once you eventually notice) the garage may be busy, the parts may be hard to get, and the actual failure of one part may have caused all sorts of other problems. You almost certainly end up paying a lot more than if you’d just maintained it well it in the first place – and cost yourself a lot of opportunities to reach those customers.
- Argh! I tried to fix it and I broke it more! There’s no shortage of YouTube videos on how to fix trucks – but how confident are you that the solution provided is for the problem you’ve got? Do you even have the right tools and parts to hand? Once you start trying to mend it – could you actually be making it worse?
But a website’s nothing like a truck! It’s much simpler than that!
The analogy with vehicles works well here too. They’ve certainly got slicker over the years, and generally more reliable… but also, much MUCH more complex “under the hood”. So you REALLY want to make sure that you have someone looking after it for you who knows what they’re doing – the days of adjusting your own spark plugs are long gone!
Here at Enterprising IT, we maintain lots of websites for people – it’s currently the majority of what we do. So we can tell you that on average, the very simplest of these sites will have over 30 individual updates applied each and every month. Add that to the daily site and email backups, the regular reviews of site speed and Google performance, and the 24×7 uptime monitoring to ensure that these sites are all actually still reaching their intended audience, and it seems astonishing that anyone would try to either do all of that on their own or choose to avoid it completely and trust that everything would be OK!
If you’d like a comprehensive FREE site audit to look at how up-to-date (or otherwise) your site is, with some genuinely useful suggestions for what to do next, please get in touch with us today – we’re always happy to provide free, no-obligation advice.
So in summary…
YES you can save money in the (very) short term by not having your site maintained!
But… NO it doesn’t generally save you money in the long term. Unless your site maintenance package is expensive (and ours definitely aren’t), it’s almost always most cost-effective to have someone maintaining your site – and just making sure that it never goes wrong in the first place.
Please get in touch if you’d like any advice!
