If you’re new to web development, then you might find yourself getting a little lost and confused. After all there are so many different technical terms and phrases that you have to wrap your head around, and it can quickly become overwhelming. 

When you purchase a new appliance like a car, you know you need to perform routine maintenance to keep it running smoothly. Your website is no different. If you want your website to be working properly, at optimal levels, you need proper hosting and maintenance. 

To help you see through all the jargon, we’ve compiled this guide to help you understand why you need website hosting and maintenance. 

What is website hosting and maintenance?

Hosting

With a retail shopfront, you have to pay rent to occupy that space each month. For your virtual shop front, it’s a similar concept, but in a much cheaper form. You have to pay for the space you occupy online, otherwise people won’t be able to reach your website. 

Hosting refers to storing the files that power your website, and the network connectivity that enables the rest of the world to see it. 

Basically, you’re paying for the space where your website lives and where it grows. 

The files for your website may be stored on a dedicated server, or on a shared server with other websites. There are benefits to each of these options, but ultimately you want to choose a hosting package that will give you fast loading speeds and regular security updates. 

This way you can guarantee that your website is securely stored, and your users are getting a fast and friendly experience on your site. 

Maintenance 

Website maintenance services do the work to keep your site fully operational and running smoothly. 

A website is never truly complete, because things are constantly changing online. You need regular maintenance to keep up with the times. If you don’t maintain your website, it can face a whole range of issues and threats. 

If your website stops working or if you have design flaws, you are potentially losing customers and sales. Additionally, if you face security issues online, you could deter customers, as well ruin your brand image.

With website maintenance, you can remain proactive about your site. Rather than having to fix issues as they pop up, you can avoid the faults altogether. 

And when issues do arise, you have a team of professionals ready to help you fix them as fast as possible. 

Why do you need website hosting and maintenance?

Without a place to host your website and connect you to the rest of the world, your website is useless. 

Without a maintenance plan, your website is likely to become outdated very quickly, and your beautiful shiny new virtual shop front will run into security issues, as well as other design flaws. 

Here are some of the key benefits of hosting and maintenance services. 

Keep software up to date and improve your security 

Websites are complicated, and delicate. If a hacker discovers a vulnerability in your code, they can take advantage of this. This can lead to viruses on your website that can cause serious damage to your business.

To prevent this, maintenance includes regular updates, including software updates for the latest plugins, patches and security updates. 

Even with all these preventative measures, you can still suffer from a security breach. However with a good hosting and maintenance team, you will be in a position to deal with it quickly and efficiently. 

Keep your SEO strategy fresh 

Your search engine optimisation strategy should include regular website updates. Your google rankings will benefit from a website that is fast, error free and has regular content updates. 

If you regularly have both your on-page and off-page content updated, you will be giving search engines more material to rank you with. 

Uploading engaging and relevant content can keep your customers coming back to learn more. If you don’t update your keywords or content regularly, your customers may be put off by the old material. 

You want to show your potential customers that you are active, and you are putting energy and effort into your business. 

Backup Your Website

Regular backups of your website ensure that if anything ever goes wrong, you can quickly get it back up and running with minimal data loss. 

Backups should be performed regularly, as well as before any software updates. 

Your backups should include a backup of your code, including any plugins or themes you are using, as well as a backup of the content on your website such as photos and text. 

Update website with new features 

With regular web hosting and maintenance services, you can make sure that you are taking advantage of the latest updates and features. 

If you developed your website even just a few years ago, you will know that there have been many new features introduced to online websites, such as social media integration. 

Website technology is rapidly evolving, and many customers expect you to have all the latest features on your website. Having an SSL certificate to encrypt communications on your website is a feature that is essential if you want customers to feel safe sharing their personal information with you. 

Improve your visitor experience 

Your website is ultimately all about giving your customers a good experience. You want your customers to enjoy using your website, whether it’s through an pleasing design, or making sure you don’t have broken links. 

Your website represents your business and your brand as a whole. You want it to be giving off the best impression possible to anyone who visits.

Regular maintenance can help ensure that your website reflects your brand identity well. To improve your users experience, as well as customer retention, you will want to regular check the following;

• Page speed and broken links – you want to avoid slow loading pages and links that go nowhere
• Excessive site down time
• Page not found errors (404 errors) 

You also want to regularly make sure that your website and pages are optimised for all kinds of devices and web browsers. This means that no matter what your customer is trying to search on, they can find your website, and your website will look good. 

This is a great way to improve your reach, and offer a high quality customer experience. 

Get professional website hosting and maintenance services

If you have the time and skills, you can do your own website hosting and maintenance, but it is likely you may not be qualified for the job, or have the time to handle it all while also running your business. 

Trying to do it all yourself can often lead to you breaking your own website, and doing more harm than good. 

You wouldn’t try to fix your own pipes, you’d call a plumber. So why would you try and maintain your own website?

Englander Davis offers a range of affordable and reliable hosting and maintenance packages, you can explore the packages here.