Congratulations. Your site is live. We can now forget all about it right?
You can.
The hackers won’t.
Updates
Just like the apps on your phone or the ones on your desktop, there’s updates. The more complex your site the more substantial the updates. You can choose to enable automatic updates of course, but we all know that updates can break things or change things. I recommend automatic updates just for those things that, if they go wrong, won’t break the user experience – for example, you may have software that connects your website to your Google Analytics dashboard. If this breaks, the worst thing that can happen is that the data from your website is no longer being collected. The user experience is unbroken.
Security updates can be critical, feature updates less so. A good web agency will take care of these for you under a maintenance program. My company does updates every two weeks as scheduled and, if there’s an identified security vulnerability, we log in later that same day and patch it.
Content
What about new pages. What if you are introducing a new service or what to make an announcement about a new client you’ve just won. As your business grows, you’ll need to keep refreshing the content on your site to reflect these changes. Perhaps the most common pages to change are the news pages and the “meet our team” pages for whenever you have a new hire or someone leaves.
TIP : Google loves new content; it shows them that your website and business is still active and this will help promote your site above ‘stale’ sites.
Again, I don’t recommend adding new content unless you’ve been given an easy to use template to work with. For my clients I simply ask that they send me the raw text and/or any images and I’ll construct the page for them. It takes a load off their plate and I’ll probably be able to do it in a 10th of the time they would take.
So don’t think of you website as every really “finished”. Like the apps on your phone there will be patches and updates and new functionality added and speed improvements and so on.
Keep the content fresh, keep the site safe and it’ll serve you well for years.