why hire a website maintenance company

People often misjudge the need to aptly maintain their website. They would trust another agency for building their website and then would employ their own resource for handling the website. While this approach is not bad, people often end up spending more in maintenance than in website development. The perennial question remains, should you hire a website designing agency to maintain the website or maintain it inhouse.

The answer to this question lies in the complexity of tasks that are required everyday or every month to keep a website up and running. Especially in ecommerce business, this is very important since new products and user experience improvements should come every day.  There is always a need to update inventory and variants on an ecommerce website.

Here are top reasons website owners should hire a professional website agency to do regular maintenance tasks on the website

1. Its cheaper

Hiring a person has a cost. Cost is incurred first in hiring a candidate, either a specialized IT staffing agency is hired or the hiring is done inhouse, in most cases, due to the technical nature of the project, an IT staffing agency is required. First business owners have to pay them around 8 % of annual CTC as commission, then there is salary, then the employer has to incur employment benefits, then there are overheads like office seat, computer / laptop. Considerable money is also spent on training the candidate. Also its never a one man job, website maintenance has a dual aspect. One is aesthetics, other is functionality. While professional agency might have different teams for both the tasks, you will just have one resource to do it. Again, you will need a senior level manager / IT specialists to keep a check on the subordinate. A website agency can do it at a fraction of the cost.

2. Talent Pool

A professional website maintenance company would have a larger talent pool to handle the multitudinous problems that might occur on a web application. A website agency or a company would have separate teams to take care of the problems. As your traffic goes, you will also require server management and maintenance which is also a tedious task to do yourself.

3. Focus on Core Business

The time and energy you would spend on saving a few bucks can be better utilized in your core business. You will be much happier to increase your business rather than getting tangled in technical work. There is an inherent advantage of hiring a professional website maintenance company.

4. Major upgrades

Website designing and maintenance companies monitor major technology changes regularly. Because they have a bigger skin in the game, they are in a better position to implement any new technology benefits to your project. For example php development has significantly improved in the past couple of years. The newer versions of PHP are really good and they even outperform javascript backend languages in concurrent testing. The speed and security has vastly improved. A professional agency can bring these benefits to your project faster.

5. Security

Cyberhacking and data theft has become a major roadblock to your online success. So mush so that right now, website security firms are sitting on piles of cash. Data has become so important that physical security has now taken a back seat. A professional website designing and maintenance agency can really be more proactive in plugging loop holes since they are actively involved in a developer community. They can discover major security vulnerabilities in open source softwares and patch your website / server faster.

6. Website Quality

Today websites are built with dynamic frontend and backend. This means that websites can be operated by people with little or no technical knowledge at all. For example wordpress, which is a content management system, a website built on wordpress is the easiest to handle. Inspite of that, a professional website maintenance agency can do a better job. This is because an agency has seen the length and breadth of all websites and how they impact user experience. Recently a client tried to upload new images on the website and he uploaded 5 MB images that crashed the entire website. We explained the steps to downsize images and tried to explain him about how to downsize images etc. After a few days, he outsourced the work to us.

7. Contingency measures

The internet world is volatile, websites can perform erratically under different circumstances. If your entire business model is dependent on your website, you must hire a professional company to take contingency measures. Backups should be taken regularly to ensure longevity. We often take 2-3 backups per week to safeguard ourselves from any untoward incidents. A professional agency can take appropriate measures to make sure that your website uptime is 99%.

8. Performance monitoring

Website performance has become a major factor in google rankings. Website speed matters, the user experience matters. A professional agency is better equipped to handle website performance and implement new and creative measures for better performance.

9. Functionality Audits

Imagine that your SMTP quote was over and suddenly, your clients stopped receiving emails from your ecommerce store. You would not even know whats going on. Your backend might be flashing this information all day, but it would miss your eye. It recently happened with a company that approached us for website maintenance. Before we came in the picture, they had suffered a massive loss of Rs. 5 lakhs because their payment gateway was not working, the payment gateway vendor changed the API and people were unable to checkout from the page. Till they realized what had happened, they suffered a blow. Now we regularly carry out audits to ensure that everything is working as expected.

Focus on your business and hire a website maintenance agency for a better performing website.