Managed IT Services for Website Maintenance – A Guide with 8 Tips for Small Businesses

Managed IT Services for Website Maintenance

Last updated - January 19, 2023

For small business owners, here’s a quick refresher.

Managed IT service is a common phrase in the business and IT world. It means outsourcing a wide variety of tasks to third-party providers who offer a certain level of skills, expertise, and tools to help you achieve your goals. 

Offloading such tasks to a professional is an excellent way to improve the quality of a business’s services, minimizing costs and cutting the amount of work that in-house employees handle. This opens up a lot of leeways for them to focus on other equally important tasks.

The entities responsible for delivering managed IT services are known as managed IT service providers. Whether working as an individual or as an entire dedicated team, they oversee and handle all matters related to technology and data. You can even count on them to make recommendations and adjustments that can help you take your assets further.

Planned Maintenance man hand on table Business, coffee, Split tone

Of course, that means you can also rely on them to help you with website maintenance. They’re responsible for updating software to optimize your site’s performance, monitoring its functionality, finding ways to improve design, and reviewing its security features to ensure it’s equipped to handle cyber threats.

And if your business leverages cloud technology, they provide managed cloud services to maximize the security of your data and take total advantage of its unique perks.

To better understand managed IT services for website maintenance, here’s a guide to what professionals can do for your small business.

1. Creating A Backup For Essential Files

Before making any adjustments and modifications to the website, the experts can create a backup of the site’s current assets and critical data. This includes:

  • Pages
  • Blog posts
  • Plugins
  • Images

Having backup storage is so crucial in a practical sense. This is because when an error or attack occurs and damages your data, you no longer have to worry about retrieval and restoration. You just go to your backup and rebuild everything from there.

Since it helps prevent significant site-related hiccups, making backups is a huge part of website maintenance. In the case of your business, experts can help you back up data on both physical and virtual platforms. The cloud is the latest iteration of these.

The good thing is that almost all website builders and content management systems have a site backup option. You practically get that as soon as you choose to work with a managed IT service provider. Make sure to ask them how often they back up data; most do it once or twice a week.

2. Doing Proper Search Engine Optimization

Since your business is still small, you would want to get more traffic to your website and attract as many customers as possible. Outsourcing managed IT services can help. Website performance is closely tied to the success of SEO, after all. Their diagnostic tools can help you find areas where your site’s functionality needs improvement.

Some of the things they do for SEO include:

  • Evaluating the efficacy of your current choice of web hosting
  • Identifying high-performing, relevant keywords
  • Revamping your content to better meet user interface needs
  • Optimizing images and blog posts
  • Checking if your assets fit current algorithms

With their help, employing better SEO strategies to help rank your business among the top search engines becomes easier. In turn, you get more out of your investment.

3. Constantly Checking For Updates

One reason your business needs managed IT services to maintain your website is that all forms of software regularly get updated. If you’re too occupied with handling other tasks, such as coordinating with your employees, it’s easy to miss them.

As a business owner leveraging digital technology, you can’t afford to do that. These updates are usually made in response to performance and security issues. The longer you go without them, the likelier you’ll find problems with running your website due to the same issues they’re trying to fix. 

To make sure your website remains updated, you can outsource an expert to be on the lookout for them.

Once they’ve made the required updates, they can help you check for any disruptions or data losses. Test the updates by clicking different elements in your website to confirm whether everything is intact. If you discover that you’ve lost a file or document, you can retrieve it from your backup and restore it to its rightful place with their help.

4. Boosting Your Site’s Speed

Many people don’t like navigating slow websites. If the loading time is more than two or three seconds, they may decide to leave the site and never come back again. So, fast page loading is essential if you want to give your customers a smooth user experience.

In that case, you need an expert IT service provider to ensure that your site has top-notch speed, allowing users to access the information they need as quickly as possible. Besides satisfying your customer’s need for ease and convenience, high loading can also improve your search engine rankings.

If your site is slow and individuals opt out of it as soon as they get there, the algorithms of major search engines will find your website unsuitable for their user’s needs, pushing it down the rankings. That starts a cascade of negative effects that will make it much harder for your brand to grow online.

5. Ensuring That The Site Has High-Quality Content

Your site’s content affects your search engine rankings. Some may need to be updated if you have been creating blog posts for your small business for a while. Otherwise, you create verbal deadwood in your site, tanking your credibility and dragging your SEO efforts down.

As much as your goal is to create blog content that taps into the current needs of your audience, you still have to check the significance of other blog posts. Always ask yourself if they offer any value to your customers.

Managed IT service providers can assist in content auditing and help you refresh your website’s content regularly. This will not only ensure that you deliver quality, but also improve your conversion rates in the long run.

6. Dealing With HTML Errors

Another essential function of managed IT service provider for your website is fixing HTML code errors. This is always challenging for people who’re not well-versed in programming languages in the first place. 

The service provider can check if the code is working well. This is important because even the most minor errors can cause serious issues like missing media. Visitors can easily tell when the HTML isn’t working right, since the effects are always glaringly visible.

7. Checking The Website’s Analytics

You may have great content and an appealing website design. But these only count if they actually take you closer to your performance goals. For this reason, you need to check your analytics page to confirm what’s affecting your metrics.

For example, if you notice that some pages have high traffic but low average times and conversions, the increased number of visitors isn’t doing your brand favors. A specific page may hit all the marks for the algorithm yet fail to deliver the ideal customer experience for first-time viewers.

The managed IT service provider helps you grasp what your website analytics means and determine where it excels and lacks. Once you’ve done that, they then assist you in optimizing key pages, functions, or features to improve the performance of your site.

8. Testing Your Sites Usability

The ideal managed IT service provider conducts usability testing at least once a year to check how users interact with your site and make readjustments. These regular evaluations let them identify issues you’ve probably overlooked and give you the appropriate solutions.

Usability testing measures average user experience in terms of ease of navigation. The process involves running through different parts of your website and seeing how well they perform, particularly in their loading speed, asset retrieval, and completeness in configuration. In turn, this provides you with a roadmap of strategies to improve your site and gain more traffic in the long run.

9. Update Your Site’s Software

A content management system like WordPress requires regular updates, usually for the reasons previously mentioned. While it can upgrade itself automatically, sometimes the process needs to be done manually for a more customized upgrade. That’s where working with a managed IT service provider comes in handy.

Give Your Small Business’s Website The Right Help With The Right Provider

Website maintenance is critical to ensuring you have a working platform for your brand’s online presence. In a highly digital marketplace, it’s one of your best tools to stay afloat and grow as a business. That’s why you should consider outsourcing managed IT services. They have the expertise, tools, and industry knowledge to help your website achieve peak performance. 

With their scalable website maintenance solutions, attracting more users to your website, raising your conversions, and building more networks and avenues for growth are possible. Start looking for the right IT service partner today. And remember to stick to professionals for the best advice and guidance.

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