Websites: Life After Launch

Congratulations! Your website is finally live! This is the day you have been dreaming of. After months of planning, writing, keyword research, and endless rounds of graphic design edits, your website is finally born!

Hello, World!

Now it’s time to sit back, admire and enjoy your completed website. Your eCommerce site will be generating orders, your dropship system is in place – modern automation at its finest. Your service pages are optimized and you’re ready to receive all the leads that will be filling out your forms. It’s go-time.

No further attention needed, right? Well, not exactly. Your website is live, which is something to be very proud of! It was a long road to get here and you’ve made it – great job! Yet the reality is that a website is never really done. It’s a living, breathing, work of art that needs continuous care.  

Growing Your Site

Think of your website as your garden. Once you’ve tilled the soil and planted your seeds neatly in rows, do you walk away from your garden expecting it will feed your family for years to come? Well, no.

You know that you’ll need to maintain your garden to keep it healthy and producing an endless supply of greenery. Fresh water, pruning off dead leaves, and providing continuous TLC is what your garden needs to thrive. This is also true for every website.

Plan for Success

A major component of your website’s success relies on the plan you create for its upkeep. It’s important to set your website up for long-term success by formulating a plan for its ongoing maintenance and required updates. Just like your computer and your smartphone, your website needs routine system updates. For example, best practices recommend that WordPress sites should be regularly updated to the latest version.  

“Once live, a site relies on the ever-changing myriad of algorithms, hardware, software, and network connections to fuel its performance,” says Next Level’s Director of Web Development, Jessica Kienzle. Performance refers to site speed, ranking, usability, and conversion. Keeping up with the technological advancements requires you to be vigilant, proactively monitoring and making updates. Aside from the inevitable functionality updates, your website should also be growing and evolving as your business’s services, products, customers, and market trends change. Adding fresh and relevant content is imperative to getting and keeping visitors. Having regular updates on your site can always boost your ranking with SERPs who believe active sites are going to have the most up-to-date and easy-to-use content for their searchers.  

“A site is a living thing,” Kienzle notes. “It requires constant attention and care to keep it running smoothly, optimized, fresh, and accurate. You never want to leave your website unattended. A website without maintenance will quickly become out of date, incur increased bounce rates, and fall to the bottom of rankings.”

A Web Development Team Can Be Your Ticket to Success

Don’t plan on going back to school to become a web developer to gain the skills and knowledge needed to execute the edits on your own? In that case, we recommend hiring a team of web development experts that are fully dedicated to your site’s optimization for the long haul. You’ll need a team who has the know-how to proactively maintain plug-ins, widgets, and code, build pages, add products, recommend features, make content changes, etc. that keep your site healthy. With a web development team on your side, you can be confident that your website will continue to bring your business success.

Want to Learn More About Our Monthly Web Care Plans? Contact Next Level Marketing Today!

Finding the right web development company to suit your needs isn’t easy. At Next Level SEM, our team of experts is here to support all of your digital marketing needs. We stay at the cutting edge of web development technology so you can be confident that we will bring your site continued success for many years to come.

If you’re looking to give your website the TLC it deserves, give us a call anytime at 1 (844) SEMNEXT (1-844-736-6398) to get started.

About the Author

Allie Franconeri is NLM’s Director of Operations, which sounds much more professional than “The Glue That Holds Everything Together.” Make no mistake, though, Allie is the heart of Next Level and, as a project manager across all departments, has a hand in every one of our clients’ successes.