Developing a Website Maintenance Plan: Why Your Handyman Business Needs One

Most contractors understand the importance of having a high-quality website that entices customers and increases their visibility online. However, like with building projects and HVAC systems, a website needs ongoing maintenance to operate at peak performance. Without web maintenance, your site can feel dated within a few years, filled with security vulnerabilities and outdated SEO strategies that make detrimental to the success of your business. 

If you’ve invested time and resources into a cutting-edge handyman website design, you owe it to yourself to keep the site running optimally. A dedicated website maintenance plan simplifies the maintenance process, ensuring that you have adequate resources and time to keep your site functioning optimally. Whether you plan on updating the site yourself or use one of the many agencies that offer website maintenance,

What Is a Website Maintenance Plan?

A website maintenance plan outlines scheduled maintenance to keep your website up and running. In addition to describing routine maintenance tasks, the plan can allocate the necessary resources for maintenance and set a schedule that addresses potential issues before they become serious problems. 

Reasons Your Website Needs Ongoing Maintenance

It’s easy to look at a cutting-edge website and expect it to function at the same level for years. However, digital marketing moves rapidly, which means that without routine checkins from a web maintenance team, your site will age faster than an untreated pine deck. Let’s explore four reasons maintenance is essential to keeping your competitive edge. 

Improve User Experience

The purpose of your website is to entice people in your service area to call you for their handyman needs, and a key feature of that strategy is to have a streamlined user experience. The more problems your potential customers face when browsing your website, such as broken links or plug-ins, slow pages, or difficult mobile navigation, the less likely they will trust you and request your services.

A website maintenance plan relies on continuous monitoring, which can identify these concerns and address them quickly. Not only does this make your site more user-friendly, but it will also ensure your hard-earned search engine ranking remains high. 

Ensure Security

Data breaches can be devastating for small and medium businesses. Failing to maintain up-to-date security features leaves your site vulnerable to attackers looking to steal data or hold your site ransom, and a breach will destroy any trust your customers may have in your services. 

Save Money on Emergency Website Fixes

As with maintenance in the real world, maintenance costs are extremely low compared to dealing with a broken or failing site. Website issues can eventually escalate into unfixable problems that lead to downtime, lost customer trust, and decreased revenue. Getting a broken website up and running may require a complete redesign or weeks of repairs. 

Keep Up with Search Engine Algorithm Changes

If you’ve invested in search engine optimization or any other digital marketing strategies, your website needs to remain up-to-date to keep up with algorithm changes. Search engines frequently alter how they rank websites, and failing to stay ahead of these changes can result in your entire SEO strategy falling apart or generating a much lower ROI than it should. 

5 Parts of a Comprehensive Website Maintenance Plan

Contractors should design their website maintenance plan and be willing to adjust it to meet any new demands. While maintenance plans are customizable, they usually contain several core components that give you the resources you need to handle most website maintenance concerns. 

1. Routine Maintenance

Routine website and server maintenance should be part of every website maintenance plan, ensuring that your website remains fast and secure through regular updates. How often you perform routine maintenance will depend largely on your website’s underlying foundation—sites built on WordPress or any other content management system (CMS) require frequent security updates, while custom-built sites may get away with monthly or quarterly maintenance. 

The most important part of this plan is keeping a routine—ensuring that your site receives constant attention, either from your in-house IT team or a third-party agency. By proactively addressing security and performance concerns, you ensure these small issues will never become serious, costly problems. 

2. Continuous Improvement

Website trends are fleeting, and what was hyper-modern one day will be stale and outdated within a few months. It’s important to view your site as a product that needs continuous improvement as what your customers expect on your website evolves.

A website maintenance plan should have a provision for continuous improvement. Many contractors will alternate periods of routine maintenance and improvement, allowing time to address ongoing concerns while also positioning the site to evolve with any marketing or technical developments. 

3. Performance Monitoring and Reporting

Performance monitoring is vital to maintaining strong website performance. Not only does monitoring give you advance warning of potential problems, but it can also help you track the effectiveness of interventions. While not strictly part of a website maintenance plan, having monitoring and reporting mechanisms in place can help you make informed decisions about future marketing strategies and website developments. 

4. Digital Marketing Improvements

If you rely on SEO or pa-per-click ad campaigns to get traffic, you’ll need to allocate resources in your website maintenance plan to stay on the cutting edge. Digital marketing campaigns always include routine tasks, such as copywriting, adding new posts, updating social media profiles, and repairing broken links that may affect your search engine ranking. 

5. Emergency Response Plan

While a website maintenance plan will ensure that your site is stable, secure, and functional, it cannot account for external factors, such as web hosting and CMS issues. Even a small outage can dramatically impact your business, so it’s essential to have a plan for when something goes wrong and have backups to keep your site online during emergencies. 

As a contractor, you don’t have the time to learn a new set of marketing skills, so why not let Handyman Marketing Pros handle the technical website maintenance for you? From helping you get the most from your handyman website to developing a website maintenance plan, we’re here to meet your needs. Call us at (530) 444-6204 for more information today!