Should You Focus on Managing Your Website or Your Business?

Spend less time on marketing management in your small business. All of us start each day with the same number of minutes: 1,440. How we spend them determines how effectively we handle our priorities and advance our goals – in life and in business. 

When you’re running a business, sometimes it seems that there are simply not enough minutes. You’re pulled between customer needs, staff issues, marketing, inventory management, and much, much more. Add to this the complexity of pivoting to new ways of doing business, as many of us embraced out of necessity in 2020, and it’s easy to see how updating your website can end up at the bottom of your priority list.

Why it’s important to update your website

We get it. Website updates can be a pain. Struggling with the content management system can eat up valuable time. Tracking down a vendor can be frustrating. Keeping up with what seems like a constant series of changing digital “best practices” for websites and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can feel overwhelming.

And yet, we don’t have to tell you that your website is your most valuable marketing tool – you know that already. But did you know that a website visitor makes a snap judgement about your site (and your brand and business) in just 50 milliseconds? In addition, most users take just under three seconds to focus on specific areas of content on a page.

This means that you have a very short window of opportunity to capture your visitors’ (and customers’) potential interest before they click off—and are lost to you forever. This means that updating your website and ensuring it’s easy to use and contains relevant, valuable content should be a #1 priority for your business.

It’s also essential to ensure your website is secure—which is a requirement (and no longer a “nice to have”). A secure website helps to boost your search rankings as well as inspire confidence in your website and brand for your potential customers. In addition, Chrome and other browsers can ding your website by actively warning visitors that your site isn’t secure.

In short, your website is either working for your business, or it’s costing you business.

Managing and updating your website isn’t the reason you go to work each day, though. Managing your business is. When you turn over managing your website to a trusted partner, you gain back more of those 1,440 minutes. You can put them to work nurturing new leads, serving existing customers, or doing anything else that helps your business grow. You can focus on why you started your business in the first place. Best of all, you can be confident that your site is updated, secure, and serving your business each and every day.

Best practices for website updates

It can be overwhelming to decide where to start when it comes to updating and managing your website, which is why choosing the right partner for marketing management can be so helpful. In general, it’s important to focus on these areas for website updates:

• Design and usability. Has it been a while since your website was updated? A site design that is text-heavy and challenging to navigate can turn away potential customers before you ever know they’re interested. In fact, nearly one in four people will stop engaging with your site if the content or layout don’t appeal to them.
• Mobile-friendly. More than 50% of search traffic comes from mobile sources, so it’s very important to ensure your website is mobile-friendly and loads quickly. In addition, 85% of users believe a company’s mobile site should be as high-quality as its desktop site.
• Relevant, enticing content. Whether it’s your product pages or a blog, relevant, easy-to-read content helps to convert visitors to customers. Posted regularly, this kind of content also helps to make sure that your site ranks highly in organic search results, driving more traffic from search engines. And this kind of traffic converts at a higher rate than traffic from other sources.
• Updated business hours. It’s always important to ensure that your site has the most up-to-date information for customers, especially in times when businesses may have changed hours or policies in relation to the pandemic.

There are other aspects of your website updates and website management that can affect your site traffic and communications. These can include your social media strategy, content writing, Google My Business listings, keyword search terms, and much more. All of them should be part of a solid SEO strategy to help your business grow online.

Managing them can be complex and time-consuming, especially if marketing management isn’t necessarily a functional strength for you or your staff.

That’s why we offer Managed WordPress Hosting Packages. For a small investment, you know your site will be updated. For example, these updates could include:

• Updates to your business hours
• Copy updates on new health and safety protocols
• Calendar updates for virtual events
• New images to refresh your site
• Copy for new products or services
• Bio and photos for new team members
• Blog articles, news releases, and other resources

We can handle all these website update needs and more, saving you time while

In addition to content updates, our hosting and maintenance plans include free daily backups and one-click restore, free 24/7 support, WordPress core software and security updates, monthly WordPress and plugin updates, website performance monitoring, and SSL Certificates with SHA2 & 2048-bit encryption. 

We also offer content strategy and writing services to give you frequent, timely, relevant content, which boosts your search engine rankings to increase site traffic, leads, and growth for your brand and business.

Ready to focus more time and energy on doing what you do best? We’re ready to support you. 

Learn more about our services and monthly hosting and maintenance plans or reach out to start the conversation.