# Development

The Importance of Post-Launch Website Support: Why Your Site Needs Ongoing Care

Red Rocket TeamOct 11, 20246 min read

Recently performed studies say that most website failures occur due to webmasters ignoring ongoing maintenance and updates. This can lead to various consequences including technical errors and reduced customer engagement. For example, about 50% of people will leave an online platform with a poorly designed website.

No matter what niche you are operating in, when you launch a website, you hope to get more customers, improve brand awareness, and generate more revenue. However, the main mistake beginners make is forgetting about ongoing website management. In fact, there are many benefits of ongoing website maintenance. This article will tell you more about what happens if you don't maintain your website. The Importance of Post-Launch.jpg

Who Needs Website Support?

A quality website is an essential element of any business or entrepreneur in 2024. Despite the strong growth in the popularity of mobile apps, websites are still the number one platform for interacting with customers and selling products or services.

Let's compare a website to something simple, like a typical vehicle. When you buy a new car, you know how important it is to have regular checkups, engine oil changes, and repairs. If you ignore these processes, the car will simply fall into disrepair and will not be able to perform its primary functions. Website monitoring after launch is very similar in meaning to the car example. However, many people don't realize who exactly needs post-launch website care.

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Businesses and enterprises. Obviously, such services are primarily needed for businesses that want to strengthen their online presence. Business websites often have common technical errors, poor design and also platform security issues. It doesn't matter at all what the business is in.
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Web developers and agencies. Website support service for clients who do not have the in-house technical knowledge and skills to manage their own web projects.

As practice shows, website upkeep after launch is necessary for anyone who wants to grow and improve regularly. Even if there are few competitors in your niche, you will have little chance of winning the race for customers if you ignore website upkeep.

What Services Do Website Support Consist of?

Creating a great website is not enough for success as you have to constantly keep working on it. As your website grows, you will get more new customers and your brand awareness will grow in parallel. Website maintenance is an umbrella term that encompasses an entire set to improve the platform. Below we have gathered 7 key processes that you should include in website maintenance after launch checklist.

1. Website Speed Optimization

Do you know where your potential client starts evaluating your platform? First of all, the user pays attention to how fast the pages of your website load. Statistics show that the average user leaves the website if the pages take more than three seconds to load. This is why you need to work on website speed optimization on a regular basis. Here's how you can achieve it:

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Replace heavy images with those that weigh little.
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Use caching plugins to improve speed.
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Change or improve your hosting.
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Remove various «junk» from website pages.
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These tips will help you achieve optimal loading speed for your website, both on a PC and mobile device.
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Don't forget how important this can be to your customers.

2. Improving the User Experience

The website support entails enhancing the overall UX and navigation. The aim is to keep the key pages largely clean and accessible so there are more conversion opportunities for the visitors.

Some site support services that improve user experience include launching A/B tests of new page layout and flow, using exit intent popups to lower abandon rates, adding testimonials/social proof, making sure the site is responsive to mobile, and adding breadcrumb navigation. The end of the process is a website design that is optimized to capture and sustain consumers’ attention. Monitoring includes tracking analytics to help out recognize more grounds for a future UX enhancement over time.

3. Regular Addition of New Content

Last but not least, the maintenance requires the creation and addition of fresh, new content to the website always. Having new articles, videos, resources, research, or other content on your site helps you create a sense of update for a constant visitor. It also informs search engines that your site is active and reminds the requirements of website content refresh.

It doesn't matter what services or products your business provides. Try to give potential customers as much new content as possible, including articles, tips, guides, explainer videos, images, and more. This also affects your company's credibility, as customers find websites useful if they provide valuable content. You can also create a social media presence that will drive targeted audiences from Instagram and Facebook to your website.

4. Updating of Existing Information

As practice shows, changes in business operations, product range or functionality can happen frequently. It is important to provide new information to your customers immediately. Imagine an online store with several thousand products in its assortment. You should change information in your catalog as quickly as possible about items that are out of stock or new products. If some services or data on your website are outdated, you must replace them with up-to-date information. This is why you should regularly analyze the content of the website.

Another method of website promotion is link building, which allows you to attract more organic traffic. Check if there are any broken links on your website that can negatively affect SEO. How to do it? You can use a special website broken link checker that you can find for free on the internet. When you find broken links, try to replace them with new relevant ones.

5. Tracking Key Metrics

One of the essential support services is website analytics monitoring, which means that you should monitor essential website performance parameters. This includes tracking data on users’ interactions, sales figures leads, and any other site activity figures. The website support team will configure the analytics tracking to get this information as well as prepare detailed reports that you can receive on a monthly or quarterly basis.

This data analysis allows one to determine what aspects of a website are effective and where there is potential for tripping up. For instance, high bounce rates may indicate a problem such as webpages are not properly stimulating the interest of the visitors. Knowing clear indicators of such metrics will help you improve website conversion rate in the future.

6. Fixing Technical Errors

Another crucial service that may be offered to support a website is technical maintenance, ranging from error detection to correction. This could mean addressing concerns relating to pace, website plugin updates/extensions to enhance security and functionality, and ensuring that the website works well on multiple browsers/devices.

A good support team is also involved in monitoring the website's health on a daily basis. In the event that problems emerge, they fix them as fast as possible since this can cause an interruption of service or a negative user experience.

7. Making a List of Recommendations for Website Improvement

Beyond addressing these issues, a website support team can provide guidance on how to enhance the website and make further changes as necessary. For example, the data generated might show that particular landing pages convert at a lower rate than others. The support team would then review elements such as the layout of pages or the type of content they have, etc., and give insights on the changes that should be made to these pages to enhance the conversion rates.

Potential Consequences of Neglecting Website Maintenance

Now you know about the services that make up a full-fledged website maintenance after launch. If you think that by ignoring all these services, your website will still perform well, this is not the case at all.

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Security issues. By not updating a website and its plugins/extensions frequently, it will remain defenseless against hackers. Malicious users can easily infiltrate a system to capture sensitive information from an unsuspecting user.
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Getting a bad position in search engine ranking. Most search engines, including Google, keep on changing their algorithms periodically. Websites require frequent updates and replenishment of interesting information in order to remain on top of the rankings. Websites that have no updates on the articles posted for some time gradually reduce their positions.
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Reduction in download speed. Overlooking certain technicalities such as web hosting plans, the sizes of the images used, and even the organization of the databases used on a site can considerably slow down the page loading speeds. They not only increase the bounce rate and the time spent by users on the website but also make visitors lose their patience.

It is not hard to guess that all of the above negative effects can cause a decrease in the number of customers and orders. This directly affects how much profit your company will make. A website is a complex mechanism on the Internet that has different pages, functions, and content. If you don't work on optimizing and updating, your website is only moving backward. Platforms need regular maintenance after launch to ensure efficiency. The most important thing in this aspect is regularity. For example, filling your site with new content only on a regular basis can guarantee you quality SEO promotion.

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Final thoughts

As you might have already realized, any business cannot achieve significant success in online presence neglecting post-launch website care. First and foremost, it is important to give users relevant information, images and effective design. You should also keep a constant eye on the current requirements of search engines to develop suitable SEO strategies. Conducting a full website audit once every two months is what you should do to detect errors in time and eliminate them. This approach will ensure that your website will rank better in the search engine, attract more customers, and become more useful for the overall operation of your business.

Another point that we should discuss in this article is the cost of maintenance. Many beginners do not know how much does website maintenance cost. Actually, the pricing depends on several factors, including the scale of the platform, the number of services, and whether or not you outsource maintenance. Monthly maintenance of an e-commerce platform by professionals can cost up to $5,000, while small personal websites can require only $100-200.