Buying a puppy is one of those life moments that brings pure joy. But if you don’t train that puppy all hell can break lose. You see, puppies need ongoing input and investment.

A website is much the same. There’s the elation of launching your website and seeing your brand online for the first time, and then there’s the need for ongoing input and investment. Fail to maintain your website, however, and it may become an impediment to business success.

The reality of running a small business

If you’re a small business owner, you don’t really need us to remind you of just how many roles you’re already juggling on a daily basis. Sure you may be a dentist, but suddenly you’re having to performance manage the member of staff who turned up drunk with no HR experience at all. Time is precious. Do you really need to be adding website maintenance skills to your CV as well, especially given all that is involved?

As former small business owner Aaron Roberts wrote of his own experience developing and maintaining a website for Atom Blog: “It was ineffective, hard to update and maintain, and distracted me from my core business.”

Website maintenance – what’s involved?

If you’re considering launching your brand online, our standard advice is to hire a web designer and keep them or a virtual assistant involved in the ongoing maintenance. But, if you still want to give web development a chance, there’s a few things you need to know about maintaining a web page.

First, you need to appreciate that it’s a time consuming and involved process. As Web Page Mistakes blog points out, you will be regularly required to:

• Back-up your website;
• Monitor website outages;
• Test website speed;
• Check links for breakages;
• Update software;
• Analyse statistics;
• Check your search engine results; and
• Manage your reputation.

Secondly, if you want to keep attracting customers through your website you need to update your content too. According to SEO Site Check Up, fresh content will give you higher indexing, but again, updating that is time consuming.

Outsourcing to a virtual assistant

As My Ink Blog stress:

“With a professional website design, the time you actually have to spend cleaning things up and making sure everything is up to date drops drastically, giving you more time to focus on the things that matter most – traffic, sales and increased visibility.”

The same applies to hiring a virtual assistant to perform your website maintenance; they will free up your time so you can focus on doing what you do best.

Virtual assistants will also perform regular checks on your web site to ensure it is performing optimally. And if it goes down, they’ll fix the issue for you, saving what might have taken you “hours on Google trying to find a solution.”

Given the old mantra ‘time is money’ maintaining a website yourself, without the requisite skills could end up costing you dearly. And if you are thinking about hiring someone internal to maintain your website, consider this; a webmaster’s salary can be as high as $80,000 per year, according to All Business.

Prices for a virtual assistant, however, can be as little as $99 per month, depending on the level of service you require.

Why your small business needs to hire a virtual assistant

Web maintenance can be time consuming and complex, particularly if you are not an IT professional. And as a small business operator, chances are you are already stretched to capacity without adding web site maintenance to your to-do list.

Hiring a virtual assistant to do the work for you can save you time and money, allowing you to rest assured that your web site is performing optimally. And with peace of mind, you can turn your attentions to driving traction and conversion.

If only someone could do the same with your puppy…

Interested? Still have questions?

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