For someone who is not “technically minded”, one way to understand why website maintenance is important to your business, is to think of your website like a vehicle.

In order for your website to be simply “available” when required, it has to be hosted - this is the equivalent of parking. Then whenever it's viewed the content must be transported over the internet to visitors. The resources needed to make this happen require power in the form of electricity - or fuel.

Lower cost shared hosting provides the equivalent of a communal parking space, with some vouchers for discounted fuel bundled in. This means your website can appear to be up and running and managed for a modest amount of monthly expenditure.

But hang on a minute! Since when did communal parking spaces include servicing, maintenance, MOT testing, repairs, diagnostics, insurance, cleaning, emergency recovery or performance tuning? Without any of those things in place for a vehicle, you would be rolling the dice every time you took a drive.

In reality of course legislation and common sense means that people operate their vehicles with far more consideration and forward planning.

Using shared web hosting without maintenance cover in place is like driving an uninsured vehicle, which is never serviced or checked over, and which has no MOT or breakdown cover.

Many websites are of course operated this way because the illusion of short term cost savings seem compelling. Some web companies are happy to go along with this as they want to cash in on a website build, but providing maintenance services once the site is live is just too much trouble.

The reality is of course starkly different. By taking this approach stealth costs mount, missed opportunities slip through the net and risks steadily compound over time. Combined and hidden from plain sight these soon start to outweigh any misperceived short term gains.

Dedicated, managed infrastructure

Having dedicated infrastructure (your own computer system) for your website means you have more control over resources because you are not competing for them with other companies’ websites as is the case with shared hosting. Think of it as a well maintained garage or reserved parking space.

Once you are in control, system resources like processors and memory can be monitored and optimised to get you the best performance for any given budget. Resilience can also be built in to deliver stability and optimal performance even under increased traffic. Because website performance is one of the four core metrics Google evaluates, this can impact your website's visibility.

Like a computer, a web server has many pieces of software running on it and will benefit when we can ensure the latest stable versions of these are installed - especially when more performant or secure.

Regular server updates potentially minimise downtime and help avoid security vulnerabilities.

This makes good business sense as it both helps to insure against the risk of lost business and protects your reputation.

Application maintenance

Application maintenance is the ongoing updating, analysis, modification, and re-evaluation of your web application - in other words, keeping on top of things.

Regular maintenance helps to fix or even preempt bugs, negative user experiences and security vulnerabilities as well as avoiding functionality becoming messy.

Remember, if your website is being actively maintained your developer will have the opportunities to resolve user experience issues which might otherwise result in a negative opinion. A more performant, well maintained website will therefore convert more visitors into customers, and is more likely to increase repeat visitors and boost referrals from existing customers too.

Monitoring

If you have ever had a customer inform you that your website is down the chances are you don’t have website monitoring.

Many small businesses opt to skip monitoring, but when something inevitably does go wrong it's far better to nip the problem in the bud. The alternative is that users just move on and you never hear about it.

Waiting for users to inform you is risky but monitoring services can provide certainty and start at just £5 per month. Your website can be monitored for uptime and a number of key metrics including performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO (normally represented by traffic lights).

Error tracking

A fantastic, cost effective counterpart to monitoring, error tracking service is more granular and timely - sending your developer a report almost immediately if a software error is encountered by a user of your website. This means they can react quickly and fix the issue, limiting the number of users impacted.

This contrasts with the extended periods many website owners spend waiting for bugs to be identified and fixed when error tracking is not part of the mix. In some cases bugs which would have been identified early with error tracking, are not identified for months or even years - with countless users frustrated along the way.

Starting at £10 per month, error tracking can therefore give you a great return on investment by enabling you to protect opportunities and revenue you might otherwise have missed out on.

Working together for your peace of mind, monitoring and error tracking help ensure your website uptime and user experiences are optimal and that problems can be resolved as early as possible.

Development Operations

As its name suggests developmental operations or DevOps brings together the disciplines of development (dev) and mainly IT operations (ops) to optimise the efficiency of web and software development.

When we carry out updates to your web application or fix bugs we use best practice development tools and processes which cover project management, source control (SCM), integration, storage and deployment.

Changes made to code are sent to our source control management (SCM) system which uses GIT repositories. The SCM normally has a branching code structure which allows separation of features in progress, bug fixes, staging and production.

Continuous Deployment (CD) automates changes from the SCM system being pushed to servers. This means an update or bugfix can be merged into the staging branch for immediate testing, and then once we are happy, it can be merged to production for the benefit of all your users.

Our DevOps aim for a more agile and efficient development process which helps businesses and their customers gain a competitive advantage without compromising security or stability.

We charge £10 a month to include DevOps as part of an integrated maintenance strategy.

* For large projects with multiple developers working simultaneously, Continuous Integration (CI) with automation of code testing should also be implemented. CI costs differ per project depending on the risk profile.

Backups

The importance of an appropriate backup strategy cannot be understated. It could be a simple mistake, or a full scale coordinated attack but without appropriate backups data-loss could be permanent and the damage lasting.

When deciding on an appropriate backup strategy many factors must be considered including the following:

What kind of data resilience does the customer need?
Are transactions being recorded and how often?
Are other services providing alternative resilience - e.g emails, code repositories, content delivery networks?
Does the website have a database or cache which needs to be backed up?
What are the company’s internal and external processes?
What does our risk analysis tell us?
Should backups be local or remote?
Are automatic restoration, granular data recovery, or physical full-backup copies needed?

For example if you use a headless CMS like TypedCMS you might be comfortable that your content will be backed there and that your website application will be stored in a repository. In this case additional backups may not be not required.

Alternatively for a Magento ecommerce site a more granular strategy might be needed with incremental backups taken as often as every minute.

Resilience planning

For smaller projects, resilience planning is integral to deciding which services will best help protect your website and business.

For more complex applications and more extreme scenarios, advanced resilience planning exercises may be necessary to help you to better prepare.

You never know when the worst might happen, so it's best to be as prepared as you can be.

Bringing it all together

We know every business and website application is unique and will always make service recommendations which we believe will deliver a good return on investment.

A service contract which is managed by an experienced, senior developer may seem like an extravagance but there are many ways in which it will help you protect your web application and by extension your business.