Why Quality Website Maintenance Matters for Enterprise-Level Businesses
A well-functioning and maintained website is of crucial importance for large businesses. For every corporation, their website is a public reflection of their corporate image. If it’s slow, full of bugs, and outdated information - a negative message is going to be sent about the company into the world.
A poorly managed website can also cost companies a lot of sales. Let’s say you run a big e-shop like Nike and sell a wide variety of different items on it. Imagine visitors coming to your domain and experiencing difficulty finding desired items and completing purchasing orders.
Not good, right?
Having a dated and bug infested website certainly takes a toll on overall sales numbers and customer satisfaction.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are numerous reasons why large corporations need to regularly nurture and support their website.
For companies that serve plenty of customers online and run complex operations on their website, maintenance requires a great deal of skill and attention to detail. That’s why large businesses tend to hire companies like Share IT to help them keep their digital house in order.
Here are some of the main reasons why enterprise-level businesses invest in professional website maintenance:
1. Security
Security goes beyond protecting sensitive data behind a paywall. Developing and implementing a strategy for enterprise security is a highly important and complex task that requires a deeper understanding of web security.
According to Business Insider’s findings, the personal information of more than a million people was compromised in 2018 alone. Companies like Facebook, British Airways, T-Mobile, Cambridge Analytica, and Quora have experienced severe data breaches that resulted in a loss (or exposure) of personal information of loads of people who have put their trust in these companies.
Data breaches happen for a lot of different reasons. Some companies are hacked, others mishandled or sell data to third parties. Holes in a website's security system can leave information unprotected.
Regardless of its origin, each data breach is a direct attack at the company’s credibility. The more data breaches and other security issues a single corporation experiences, the harder it will be for it to keep their customers’ trust and get more people to share their personal data.
That is why corporations should never stay content with their current best practices and strategies regarding website security.
Unless your security system continues to evolve, it will become difficult to keep valuable data safe from theft and unlawful distribution. Cyber criminals are constantly figuring out new ways to break through advanced security systems. In order to stay ahead of them, corporations need to constantly update their existing security procedures and think of new ways to protect their most valuable data.
That is why most bigger business either develop their own cyber security departments or hire companies that specialize in this kind of work.
2. Customer Experience
As said above, a poorly managed website can have an extremely negative effect on sales and customer satisfaction.
For example, if a specific company hasn’t updated its website design for a while, it won’t be properly displayed on new versions of web browsers and mobile devices.
In addition to that, an outdated website will also poorly reflect on overall customer experience. In order to keep people engaged, companies need to ensure that user interactions with their website are as pleasant as possible. The overall feel of the website needs to be fresh, exciting, and up to industry standards.
Good visuals, fast website loading time, and ease of payment - these are the main things that influence customer experience.
The last thing a client or a customer wants to see is dated information on a company website. Leaving dated offers and discounts just to hang around on a company website will create unnecessary confusion among users.
Example:
Let’s imagine that a certain customer discovers a product on a company website, at a certain price, and then decides to visit a physical store to buy it in person. When they arrive, they discover that you don’t have the desired item in stock, or that the price is very different – and all because the information on the site isn’t up-to-date. The chances are, they won’t be too thrilled about it. Some of them may have understanding for this kind of a mistake, but others may get enraged by the situation.
Regardless of the scenario, these are the moments that companies shouldn’t experience on a regular basis.
The goal is to help people see the value in company offerings and easily consume what they came to consume; not to wrestle with clutter until they find something of interest.
According to bigecommerce.com study, 51 percent of Americans prefer shopping online than in physical stores. For a lot of companies, online shopping is becoming bigger and bigger, and in that same sense, so is the importance of their website.
If they want to flourish in this overly competitive digital cyberspace, companies need to ensure that the links and contact forms on their website are working correctly. If people are experiencing difficulty completing orders on a company website, the chances are they’ll lose interest and move on to the next domain that sells similar products and services.
3. Search Engine Rankings
Regular website updates are the cornerstone of SEO. In order to secure great rankings for relevant keywords in Google search, and thus, maintain a steady stream of incoming, relevant visitors, companies need to ensure that their website is sync all the latest SEO rules.
For example, making your website mobile-friendly is now a must.
Just a year ago, Google rolled out an update that basically told every online business owner out there that they now need to pay extra attention to how their website is accessible through mobile devices. The world’s most popular search engine now examines mobile versions of websites before desktop, which basically means that companies that don’t offer their users great mobile experience won’t be able to maintain their current positions in Google’s search. But that’s just the first step. Google looks at 200 different rankings factors while calculating how to organize results in its search. A lot of them are looking at the technical side of your website: load speed, link structure, security (HTTPS), keywords, tags, meta descriptions, schema markup, etc.
For most enterprise-level companies, this is a lot of work and a lot of details that require attention. In order to keep their website fully optimized and operational, they hire companies that know how to successfully keep everything “under the curtain” nice and tidy.
4. Backups
Due to the nature of ever-evolving hacker attacks, it’s not really possible to guarantee the safety of anyone’s data. However, companies still have a chance to reduce the damage of these kinds of events by regularly backing up their data.
Data backups, archives and recoveries are absolute mission-critical sets of IT tasks for all companies that do business online. If your team can develop, implement and maintain a great data-protection strategy, then you’ll easily recovery from any disastrous event.
In case that you don’t really have a team that can handle such responsibility, there are companies out there that specialize in computer, data, and hard drive backups, as well as system recovery. They use sophisticated system that back up all of the information and stores it in a dissimilar server off site that enables constant and fast access to data. Employing them usually solves a lot of problems for big companies that process and keep a lot of data.
Closing Words
Thank you for taking the time to read this article from the beginning until the end. As you can see from everything written above, website maintenance is essential for all types of businesses, big or small. For most companies out there, their websites play a huge part of their business. They are constantly growing in importance, so making sure that they offer the best possible customer experience, and a safe and secure environment for business transactions is now of crucial importance.