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In the last post we discussed 5 reasons why website maintenance is critical to the success of your web strategy. You may be thinking to yourself, “Sure, I know keeping my website up-to-date is important. But who has time to keep their website updated?”

Can you afford not to keep it up-to-date? Let's look at another option...

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In the last post we discussed 5 reasons why website maintenance is critical to the success of your web strategy. You may be thinking to yourself, “Sure, I know keeping my website up-to-date is important. But who has time to keep their website updated?”

Can you afford not to keep your website up-to-date?

Let’s think about it. Have your ever seen websites that were broken? What impression do you get when they have expired specials? Or perhaps you’ve run across websites that were so out of date that you weren’t sure if they were still in business. Or worse, a website that has been hacked.

The challenge is that most companies have too much on their plates just trying to keep the business up and running. We completely understand. But in today’s world, a business’s website is a powerful tool in driving its success. It is just too critical to overlook this key component.

There is a way to get it done, leverage outside expertise, and avoid the costs of hiring more staff: outsourcing.

What is Outsourcing?

Outsourcing is contracting out a business process, such as web development and maintenance, to a third party rather than staffing it internally. It is a common business practice that helps a business take advantage of expertise and resources they may not have internally without the overhead of hiring additional staff.

Benefits of Outsourcing Your Web Maintenance

Whether large or small, outsourcing can be a very smart business decision. Here are 5 benefits to consider:

1. Keeps you focused on your core business

One of the biggest challenges of maintaining a website is time. More often than not, business owners and marketing directors just don’t have time to keep up with it. More importantly, the highest and best use of their time is developing and driving their business and strategy.

Depending on your computer expertise, you oftentimes may end up spending more time trying to remember how to do what you need than it is worth. A good web agency can oftentimes achieve the same thing in a fraction of the time and bring in the knowledge of SEO and best practices at the same time.

2. Keep your costs down

Until your website warrants a full-time employee, it is often more cost-effective to work with an outside agency where you don’t have the added expense of healthcare, vacation time, unemployment insurance, and other costs and overhead associated with hiring employees. Likewise, you are able to reduce or eliminate training cost associated with employee turnover.

3. Leverage the expertise of dedicated web consultants

Is your strength in web technology? Do you love to write? Are you up on the latest in the changes in the search engine world? If not, then outsourcing your web maintenance may be for you.

When working with an agency, you gain access to a broad array of expertise all of which can be focused on helping you grow your business. These include experts in technology, graphic design, business writing, SEO and others.

Agencies can provide technological and other professional expertise that you may not have in-house. Additionally, a web agency has experience of managing many other websites that can be applied to your benefit.

4. Protect your site – Protect your reputation

The last thing you need to interrupt your day is a hacked website. Not only can it take up enormous amounts of your time, it can also cause a lack of trust with your visitors coming to your site.

One of the most frequent sources of hacking is not keeping up with the latest security patches. Typically, your web hosting company will maintain the server itself, but not the software actually running the website. That is the website owner’s responsibility.

It is a real challenge keeping up with each of the different extensions on your site and monitoring for new versions and security releases. Outside agencies are intimately familiar with the systems and regularly monitor for updates and maintain backups – keeping your site secure and your reputation in tact.

5. Maintain search engine optimization and growing customer traffic

Search engines continually update their algorithms and the competitive landscape is constantly in flux. Keeping up with the latest trends in search engine optimization and making regular updates and additions to your site content are critical to maintaining and improving your search engine ranking.

An outside agency can help you track your progress through web analytics, maintain blogs and other content, make recommendations on future strategy, and help you get the most out of your website investment.

Conclusion

Whether it is you, an outside agency, or a combination, properly maintaining your site is critical to its success and realizing the optimal return on your investment. Remember the benefits:

  1. Keep you focused
  2. Reduce your cost
  3. Leverage outside expertise
  4. Keep your site and reputation protected
  5. Keep on growing

As you consider your web strategy and ways to grow your business, seriously consider working with an outside agency with the experience and expertise to help you grow over the long term.

Call us to learn more about our website maintenance services.

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“Before Katalyst completely reinvented our website, we were a slave to our previous webmaster. It took days or longer to get simple content changes made. And those webmaster assisted changes always resulted in an invoice to us. But now, our new Katalyst developed website allows even my admin staff to make these changes in realtime. We couldn’t be more satisfied!”
– Chris Jones, President
Carefree Office Technology, Inc.

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