· What does maintenance involve?
To understand the importance of maintenance, let’s draw a simple parallel with the mechanics of your car. To maintain its performance, keep it running as long as possible, and avoid breakdowns, you need to regularly check it, change the oil, top up the oil, fill up the tank, etc.
The same applies to your digital platform. Maintaining your website means regularly monitoring it and carrying out a series of essential tasks to ensure it runs smoothly.
There are several levels of intervention: ongoing maintenance, related to daily changes to the website; preventive maintenance, designed to reduce the likelihood of failures; and corrective maintenance to resolve bugs and other malfunctions.
· Who is responsible for maintenance?
Website maintenance cannot be improvised. The tasks involved require a certain amount of time and specific expertise. To protect yourself, it is necessary to call on qualified professionals. By signing a maintenance contract, you guarantee the optimal functioning of your showcase or e-commerce site. It generally consists of two parts: webmastering support and technical support.
Your service provider will regularly update your website and its content, perform technical maintenance, implement automated scripts, correct malfunctions, and implement features and modules, among other tasks.
Why perform maintenance operations?
● Ensuring the safety and sustainability of the site
● Ensure its operation and accessibility
● Optimize performance and provide an optimal user experience
● Fix technical issues
● Positively impact natural search engine optimization
● Comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Website maintenance: essential operations
Updating CMS and plugins
The CMS (WordPress, Drupal, Prestashop, Joomla, etc.) and plugins used to build your website are constantly evolving. This means that your website and its modules can be updated. New versions are regularly released to improve performance, make them more secure, and fix defects, bugs, and security flaws in previous versions. Using outdated versions will make your website vulnerable to potential cyberattacks.
Regular backups
Backing up your website data should be one of your top priorities, if not the top priority. A disaster can happen quickly and ruin your site: mishandling, technical problems, server crashes, cyberattacks, etc. Without a backup, you will lose all your data and be forced to rebuild your entire website. The financial consequences would be disastrous, especially if you run an e-commerce business. Backing up your website allows you to overcome these problems and regain access to your site through a restoration process.
Regular maintenance and cleaning
The loading speed of your website is crucial for your visitors, who expect an optimal experience. Your site regularly records routine operations and stores a large amount of data, files, features, and extensions that take up significant space and can lead to performance declines. Without regular cleaning, your site may not have enough memory to function properly. The consequences: significant slowdowns and an inexorable decline in traffic.
Fixing bugs or errors
Websites regularly encounter bugs and errors. These can include display issues, hosting problems, scripts that no longer work, 500 errors, blank pages, very slow navigation, etc. The causes of bugs can vary greatly and must be identified so that they can be corrected as quickly as possible.
The risks of poor maintenance
Cyberattacks
Poor maintenance makes your website vulnerable to viruses and other cyberattacks: data theft, system infiltration, malicious modification, spyware installation, redirection to a fake site, etc.
Bugs
A poorly maintained website will experience functional issues of varying severity that will hinder its proper functioning or, in the worst case, render it unavailable. These bugs also detract from the user experience and cause traffic to leak to competitors.
Spams
They are already flooding your inboxes, and unfortunately, they don’t spare websites either. Spam usually appears in the form of unwanted comments and is far from harmless. It clogs up your server, slows down overall performance, and negatively impacts your natural search engine optimization.
FSLI GROUP expertise at the service of small businesses and SMEs
Would you like to take out a maintenance contract?
FSLI GROUP supports you and offers solutions perfectly tailored to your needs. We create websites and offer maintenance services to our customers.
Audit and recommendations
Scalability and consulting
Maintenance and technical support
Site administration and content updates
Hosting and monthly backup