6 Reasons Why Your Business Needs Ongoing Website Support and Maintenance
Author: Pete Barfield
Imagine you’re the owner of a shop or an office in a busy city centre…
You have a growing customer base and you work hard to make sure that you offer an excellent level of customer service. You want to do everything right so your premises are well laid out, clean and tidy.
If a window breaks or gets smashed, you get it fixed as soon as possible: you don’t want anyone or anything getting in. You might increase the security presence.
And as time goes on you replace fixtures and fittings. You update equipment and ensure that everything is compliant with industry standards. You invest in a bigger space so you’re not cramped any more and you have more capacity to grow…
It’s easy to see the importance of ongoing support and maintenance when you’re dealing with physical objects and places. But when it’s virtual and cloud based, it can be harder to visualise. As a result, it might not seem so pressing.
Think again.
Your website and applications are your virtual real estate. You need to take as much, if not more, care of your website and applications as you would a physical building.
It’s never a finished product. If you set it up and leave it, you’re asking for trouble.
So what could happen if you don’t properly maintain your website or application?
1. You’re more vulnerable to hackers
Let’s deal with the potentially most damaging threat straight away: Hackers.
Hackers are continually looking for vulnerabilities on websites and apps which they can exploit. There isn’t one motivation or reason why hackers hack. And these days it’s often an automated process. There are teams of bots sent out to do damage.
If a hacker gains access to your site, there’s a range of things they could do.
Here’s a taste:
- Deface your website:
The damage to your reputation could be huge if expletives and offensive images or material are plastered across your website.
- Use you as a jumping point to hack another website:
Your website may not be the end goal or target, but it could be used as a relay. This makes it more difficult to track the hackers and you are implicated in the attack.
- Use your site to distribute illegal content:
I saw this happen to a company many years ago. Hackers uploaded a library of illegal software to their website. The company had no idea it had happened because the links weren’t in the menu structure. They were completely innocent. Nevertheless, it all got indexed by Google, which recognised it as a copyright infringement. The site was delisted so no longer appeared in search results. The company had to clean it all up. They had to apply to get the links removed. It was a headache which could have been avoided with proper website maintenance.
- Steal data:
Your customers are trusting you with their personal information and this data is hugely valuable on the black market. Depending on your business, this could range from credit card details and purchase history to home addresses and medical information. If there’s a breach, it might be impossible for your business to regain their trust. Worse still, the ICO could enforce large fines against your business if you were found to be negligent in your handling of customer data by not, for instance, keeping your site secure and maintained.
Cyber attacks can happen even if your website is fully maintained and updated. But you want to make it as hard as possible for them: Don’t be an easy target.
2. Your user experience could suffer
When you don’t maintain your website, it’s not just the potential of hackers defacing your website that could affect your user experience.
Updates are often performance updates. And if you’re not implementing them, you’re wasting opportunities.
If you don’t have an eye on your server and traffic, you may be reaching your server capacity. If your system can’t handle your traffic, it will slow down and could crash.
Keep in mind that the average human attention span is 6 seconds. Your visitor isn’t going to wait around for a slow loading or poorly performing website.
This will also have a negative impact on your SEO (see #3).
With a team to monitor your server usage, they can alert you when you’re reaching capacity or identify cyclical spikes in website traffic. You can grow and shrink your hosting requirements as needed, improving your customer experience and optimising your costs.
3. People won’t be able to find you easily, or at all, on Google
Google and other search engines index and list web pages. It’s like a big library. Their robot “spiders” crawl the web and judge websites and pages based on a range of criteria including relevancy, page load speed, quality of content and user experience.
If they find unsuitable content (e.g. if hackers deface or upload illegal software to your website), they will index it and your ranking will suffer. Chrome users will get a dangerous website warning when they try to visit your site. At worst, your website will be delisted. Nobody will be able to find you in the “organic” search results.
Google also assesses your website on downtime. It doesn’t matter whether that’s because of a crash due to traffic overload, fixing the damage caused by hackers, or another reason. The longer it’s out of action, the bigger the effect on your ranking.
Ongoing maintenance and support ensures that your website is updated and secure, optimising performance and minimising the chance of downtime.
4. You could lose valuable data forever
Backups are critical to a business. You can backup databases, videos, files, images…
If something happens to the original, your backup is there to replace it.
Some key questions to consider are:
- How often are you backing up your data?
- Where are you backing up your data to?
- Do you know if you can restore data from the backup?
Over the years I’ve heard people say how they’ve backed up their data. In the days of tapes they would take the tapes off site and diligently swapped it round every week. But they didn’t test the tapes and then found out that they couldn’t restore anything.
Or worse, they would make a backup and keep it next to or in the same room as the server. If anything had happened to the building, the backup would be destroyed as well, defeating the purpose of the backup.
It’s a similar situation to digital backups. Is anyone in the team checking that the backup is updated?
Be mindful of the difference between backups and replication.
With AWS (Amazon Web Services), Amazon S3 is a public cloud storage resource which stores data in buckets. Buckets can be replicated across regions, data centres and Availability Zones (AZ). This is great if an AZ fails. You can still carry on working and accessing the data. However, the problem lies in if someone gains access to your application and deletes data. Whatever happens here, is replicated over there.
That’s not a backup.
You need a backup structure which is based in a different cloud provider. It can be in the same region, e.g. UK, if it’s a requirement of your data compliance but It will be a completely different network and data centre.
We take data from Amazon S3, put it on Google Cloud Platform and do an automatic back up from there.
5. Your insurance could be invalidated
If your website or application isn’t properly maintained, you may not be compliant with your industry standards or regulations e.g. Ecommerce sites should be PCI compliant – a security standard defined by the Payment Card Industry.
This could invalidate your insurance, should you need to make a claim. It could also affect your ability to accept card payments in the future.
We use CloudChekr with AWS. It continually checks the environment against the latest standards compliance and the best known practices to help ensure your hosting is in tip top condition.
6. Your business loses money
Everything boils down to one main problem. If your website or application is down, for whatever reason, potential customers aren’t going to find you, it’s going to have an impact on your SEO, and your staff aren’t going to be productive.
And as a result, you’re going to lose out on business and revenue.
This is why it’s so important to keep your websites maintained and have ongoing support to do it.
How Cloud Construct can help you:
Cloud Construct has more than 30 years of experience working in website and software development. We’ve seen how businesses can get into hot water, and we’ve been there to bail them out.
If you want to ensure your websites and applications are secure, compliant and optimised, let’s chat.
We offer maintenance and support packages including:
- Essential for ecommerce hosting to maintain PCI compliance
- Operating system and web services security updates and maintenance
- Web application updates and patching (ie WordPress or Prestashop)
- Management and monitoring of backup
