Regular Website Maintenance or Negligence: Which One Do You Want to Pay for?

Website’s make an integral part of your business’s online presence.

Still, creating a stunning website won’t do you any good unless you regularly maintain it.

This brings us to the next point, business neglect to maintain their website, and its s a severe ongoing issue.  Most business owners are uninformed and don’t know the extent of damage an ill-maintained website can do to their brand or business.

We will explain how neglecting your website’s maintenance can affect you. But first, we will explain how you can prevent it by investing a minor sum every month and keeping your site optimal.

Cost of Maintaining Your Website

The average web maintenance cost varies from $5-$5,000 monthly to $60-$60,000 yearly. Big websites like Amazon, Alibaba (and others) cost more.

Your website’s platform (WordPress, Shopify, etc.), features, and services (among other factors) determine the overall cost of maintenance. A large e-commerce site will have higher maintenance costs than a small portfolio website.

Monthly Website Maintenance Costs According to Website Type

  • Small/Large Blog or Portfolio – $10-15/month
  • Local Business Site – $150+/month
  • Large Business Site – $500+/month
  • Small E-commerce Store – $600+/month
  • Large E-commerce Store – $1000/month

Note: This is a close estimate, not the actual costs. Still, this table should give you a pretty good idea of what regular web maintenance should cost you (based on your site or needs).

So, you pay a flat monthly (or weekly/yearly) fee for regular maintenance.

While it doesn’t guarantee 100% uptime, paying for regular maintenance ensures your site’s downtime, outage or issues are kept to a bare minimum. Even if something happens, you get instant recovery.

Still, do you think it’s a good investment?

Costs of Not Maintaining your website

It’s hard to evaluate the cost of web maintenance-related issues like outages, downtime, loss of trust, or brand value. However, it’s safe to presume that the cost of maintaining your site outweighs the cost of not maintaining your website.

But don’t take our word for it. Instead, see for yourself!

Drop in SEO Ranking

Googlebot regularly crawls your site, collects data, and changes its ranking. If your website is not working properly or is unavailable, it will adversely affect your ranking.

You will lose your ranking and your visitors. The longer your website is down, the less it will get crawled, thus making it difficult to recover your position.

Increased Bound Rate

If your website is down and people are trying to access it, they will bounce from it.

A website that suffers from slow loading or performance will lose visitors and business to competitors, apart from penalizing your rankings in Google.

Downtime

When an online service or website is not accessible or performs properly, the site or service is facing downtime or an outage.

The cost of downtime depends on different factors and how quickly you recover from it. But how much does it cost business? The answer is “Dearly,” and it’s not an exaggeration. It’s true; the cost of downtime can go from thousands of dollars to almost fatal, depending on your business size, revenue, and trust value.

Loss of Revenue or Sales

The cost of downtime or lack of maintenance is high (to say the least). Each minute costs you and your business. What’s more interesting is that this loss is not only monetary; it costs in terms of Data Loss, Lost in Productivity, Brand or Reputation Damage, and Lost in Revenue.

You need to add the labor cost to the monthly revenue lost to calculate the loss per hour.

You can calculate the labor cost per hour of downtime, and add in your revenue, number of employees, average annual benefits, number of hours worked each week, and the percentage of the workforce the downtime can affect.

The Mathematical Equation

Now for revenue lost per hour, you should consider how much revenue you make every day and the percentage of your revenue the outage would affect.

Once you have the final number, write down the duration of the outage, convert it to numbers, and divide it by the total outage cost, and you will have your answer.

For example, an eCommerce store went down for 2 hours, and the store made an hourly sale of $1000. This way, the store lost (1-hour x 1000) x 2 hours = $2000 during an outage. If you divide it by minutes (2 hours = 120 minutes), then 2000 divided by 120 = 16.6. You lost $16.6 per minute (loss of revenue per minute). If you add labor and other expenses, this cost will only rise. I hope this gives you a clearer picture.

Poor Customer Experience

The most harmful effect of not maintaining your website is losing a customer or their trust in your brand. For instance, if you have an eCommerce store, someone bought something from you and logged in to track their order.

  • What happens when they find your website is down?
  • What sort of impression does it leave on your audience?

They might think they got scammed, making them call their bank and cancel the order. Will that buyer come back to your site? What will they tell their friends about you?

Consider it as a lost opportunity (or opportunities). It would be a tremendous monetary and reputation loss for your business, even if your site were down for a few hours.

So, negligence in regularly maintaining your website can cost you thousands of dollars, if not more. All of it is only the monetary losses; we are not adding the loss of customer trust in your brand, drop in google ranking, the cost of bad user experience, increased bounce rate, etc.

Final Word

We say it’s safe to assume the cost of neglecting web maintenance outweighs the cost of paying for regular web maintenance by several folds (at least).

So, do you want to pay for regular web maintenance or negligence of regular web maintenance?

The choice is yours!

 

 

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