It’s very beneficial to perform maintenance on a website. This allows for sorting and cleaning up. It also helps keep a website clean and stable. Optimum Circle discusses with you the various reasons for implementing regular maintenance on your website.
What is website maintenance ?
Website maintenance involves regularly maintaining your website. The site (or only certain services) is no longer accessible to visitors, and a temporary page informs them of the situation. During this time, you can correct errors and bugs and improve your website without external inconvenience. This function is also useful for deploying new services on your website.
The different types of maintenance :
There are 3 main types of website maintenance:
- Corrective maintenance : Involves repairing and restoring the website to its original state before any failure occurred.
- Preventive maintenance : Involves implementing regular maintenance to prevent the occurrence of failures and avoid the need for corrective maintenance.
- Evolutionary maintenance : Involves implementing new services, functionalities, or improving existing ones that are already integrated.
Ensure security
All websites are regularly targeted by malicious individuals/groups, including SQL injections, XSS injections, various viruses, attempted DDoS attacks, and malware. It is essential to take measures to counter threats to your website.
Take DDoS attacks, for example. These can render your website/e-commerce site unavailable for a period of time. A customer who cannot access your online store during this time will be discouraged and may conclude a negative user experience. In addition to potentially missing out on a sale, you risk sending the same customer to your competitors.
Implementing maintenance allows you to freely update your security systems, identify potential vulnerabilities, and correct them. Preventive maintenance will therefore allow you to address security issues before implementing corrective maintenance, thus avoiding inconvenience to your clients/visitors.
Finally, it’s also the time to think about backing up your website data. If you later become a victim of an attack, this will allow you to revert to a recent backup of your data and avoid any loss.
Fix bugs and improve performance
In the same spirit of ensuring the security of your website, also ensure its smooth operation. Prevention can help you detect and fix various issues such as broken links. It’s not pleasant for a visitor to encounter a 404 error.
If despite all the prevention, a problem couldn’t be corrected in time, then corrective maintenance needs to be implemented. It will allow you to address major issues and restore your site to its previous state.
This will give you the opportunity to address problems that may also come from the external environment of your website. Indeed, your website relies on certain modules and even its general functioning on external applications:
- A modified API that you use
- Your hosting provider itself undergoes an attack that directly or indirectly affects you
- Updates to a browser
- Updates to your CMS and extensions if you use any
We need to hurry ! Without a support contract, you may spend a lot of time finding the flaw, fixing bugs, restoring data… If you remain inactive for too long, your website could suffer consequences from Google, and you may lose your position in search engines, requiring you to start a new SEO effort.
Adapt and improve in the face of evolution.
In this final point, we’ll address the need to implement the third type of maintenance : evolutionary maintenance. This is also necessary to position yourself against your competitors.
As an e-commerce primarily, it’s vital not to lag behind the competition, to offer the same features, or even more innovative and unique ones to get ahead of them.
To implement new features and functionalities, it necessarily involves evolutionary maintenance. It will make it possible to work separately without being disturbed during the implementation of new features, but it can also be useful for simply updating the visual style and usability of your website.
Why implement a maintenance contract ?
With a maintenance contract, you don’t need to implement the various types of maintenance yourself; the professional will take care of maintaining your website. If you’re considering implementing this system, your web agency, Optimum Circle, is here to help. You can contact us now.
It’s worthwhile to consider implementing different types of maintenance; they allow time to prevent and correct issues and to add new functionalities. If you’re interested in setting up an IT maintenance contract, contact us now.
Three ideas to remember
The different types of maintenance
There are three types of maintenance : evolutionary maintenance, which follows the evolution of your website and improves it. Preventive maintenance anticipates vulnerabilities and potential emergence of new bugs. Finally, corrective maintenance, which, when prevention fails, corrects the problems.
The advantages of maintenance
Implementing a maintenance system ensures you the freedom to excel in the quality, security, and stability of your website.
The benefits of a maintenance contract
Implementing this type of contract allows you to delegate the task of maintenance to an experienced professional and thus save time.