A good website hosting plan is far more than space on a server. It’s a highly proactive and valuable service administered by trained professionals! Your website has parts that will break, expire and cause communication problems, just like your car’s parts will eventually break or malfunction and cause transportation problems.
If you’ve owned a website for any length of time, you’ve surely experienced a utility malfunction, broken page link or even a complete outage. Panic can set in when that happens, especially in a marketing or sales-driven company. You can begin to imagine people visiting your site and leaving with the impression that your company’s act isn’t really together. Or, maybe you’re frustrated that your competition comes up in keyword searches, but your site is nowhere to be found.
Stay Functioning and Visible!
The technology overlords of the Internet don’t particularly like websites that aren’t cared for, which clutter up the data universe with a bunch of old, static and irrelevant content. And, they have ways of punishing those sites by lowering their “authority” and page ranking; search visibility.
You do not know the identity of your website visitors unless they give it to you by opting-in to an offer; filling out a form. That means potential clients, perhaps big ones, are examining your online offerings and possibly getting frustrated with their experience when your site lacks an adequate maintenance program… and you won’t even know about the lost opportunities.
FACT: Without a professionally managed program of itemized, ongoing technical maintenance and content updates, your website will suffer lower search results and diminished user experience. Some browsers such as Google Chrome might even flash a warning screen cautioning visitors before entering what they deem could be a malware prone or unsafe website.
Website Hosting Best Practice
Put your website on a managed hosting and maintenance plan instead of a basic hosting plan. A fully managed website maintenance plan costs more than basic hosting and it’s more than worth the difference! You avoid disruptions in sales and workflows caused by malfunctioning web pages. Search bots “see” a secure and well-built, mobile-friendly site to crawl and properly index content for searchers of your products & services.
My colleagues and I cannot stress enough the importance of maintaining SEO and website competitiveness today, and it’s only getting more intense out there!
Chuck Sink is principal at Chuck Sink Link, Contoocook, N.H.
