Managing a website for a small business can be daunting, however, managing a larger website can be even more stressful.
Here we break down everything you need to know about running and maintaining a website, making the website management process as simple as possible.
What is website management?
Website management refers to all the techniques and procedures required to maintain the website, from keeping it online functioning as it should, to updating content, adding images and optimising for speed.
Once the site has been built and uploaded, the second task will be to put the website up for use and start managing the site.
It takes a variety of programming languages to build websites. Learn the difference between scripts and programming languages by reading this description article.
The process for managing websites is also discussed in an upcoming post.
Why is website management so important?
When your website is /created/launched things need to be as close to perfect as possible!
How do we make this website better and safer? How does this integrate into your business strategies? Website management is a technique that allows your site to stay current with current trends and work effectively to achieve a specific target for your business.
The whole point of a website is to get website traffic to a landing page and generate leads. If your website isn’t doing this successfully, you need to understand why.
Using Search engine optimisation to get more website traffic.
As part of some website management services, for example, ours, we can offer SEO optimisation to help improve the website
Sites and services can have many different uses. Websites offer many useful services and are often useful for many important purposes.
Outsourcing your management services to a company like Klub Clicks
If you’ve got a Content management system, our website management services can alleviate a lot of the stress from running your site. We have simple management tools that increase your website security, make sure the search engines can index and crawl your pages and a whole lot more.
These are generally the most common issues we find with the websites we manage.
- The website looks drastically different on mobile devices
- Site visitors are being lost due to poor website speed
- No real landing page
What type of website do you have?
The type of website is one of the most important aspects of the management process.
There are two main ways to get a website up. One is to use custom code using a programing language like HTML and CSS, or even Python or one of the many other types of languages.
The other is to opt for a content management system.
A CMS offers unbelievable flexibility at a price that is much cheaper when compared to a custom-coded website.
Why?
This is because a CMS makes it easy to edit pages, including the home page, product pages and category pages to get the desired look you want.
You don’t have totally free reign over everything, often there are limitations based on the theme, but you’ll find for 80% of the design and code changes you want to make, you’ll be able to do it simply.
What are the 5 most popular types of CMS for managing a website?
Our number one favourite is WordPress.
WordPress is extremely popular, it’s open source and there’s a crazy amount of plugins for almost every scenario.
Whilst a lot of the plugins are free, a lot are paid, however, if you’re paying, you’ll often have access to a higher level of support, at least for a year.
Perhaps the biggest benefit of using a CMS is that you’re going to save big on web development costs which can quickly spiral out of control, especially for smaller businesses with tighter budgets.
1. WordPress
WordPress is one of the most common ways that websites are built.
There are two ways to use WordPress, one is at wordpress.com and the other is by installing the software with a web hosting company.
Website hosting can be cheap, especially if you’re using a CMS like WordPress but once you start getting more traffic, you’ll likely need website hosting with more power.
WordPress is great for service websites and eCommerce sites too with their WooCommerce plugin which makes selling simple.
2. Shopify
Talking about simple selling, Shopify is also extremely popular for people who need a business website to sell their products
3. Wix
4. Big Commerce
5. Hubspot CMS
The role of a website manager
We can talk about who has the responsibility to do this, namely web management. A website manager is responsible for managing the development of a website as it has been built, updated and secured in order.
This position could be a variety of different types depending upon the size of the organisation, website functions and budget. While many websites are part-time, some require an entire team of experts to continuously monitor and improve the website.
How do I start my website management?
Let us discuss how to start with web hosting. Before jumping into this, you have to consider your objectives before you jump in. Below, we outline 4 important steps for developing an effective online marketing strategy.
Determine your needs
The first step in your plan is the preparation of an initial need list. If there’s no need, you can’t make the right allocation of resources. Ask yourself these questions as your first step in developing a website.
You can do the same at the next stage of the allocation and the process of building resources. In addition to our recommendation, you should consult a website designer or webmaster to identify your needs that you don’t have yet.
Allocate and maximise resources
Once you have a clear picture of what needs to be achieved on your site, you will have to decide how your resources can be used to accomplish this.
These differ significantly depending on the business’s nature and size. If your job demands a full-time team or maybe a freelancing freelancer, it can help your job search.
Most companies fall somewhere between these ranges.
Sometimes hiring somebody for internal positions is not necessary while securing the same job in a freelance capacity is impossible.
Many business owners prefer a website management company. This option offers the best price per dollar spent.
Establish processes and procedures
After deciding on how to allocate your funds you must create a procedure to follow. If you’ve hired an online site manager you have good news.
They’ll handle it. A business entity can provide you with the necessary procedures to manage the operation of a website efficiently.
In other cases, when hiring internal employees or onboarding freelance employees, they will have to develop themselves. The processes in a company are actions you perform every day.
For example, your procedure will establish and document how the process should be performed to the best of your ability. Your team will use the documents for consistency in their work duties.
Monitor, improve and review
You need to monitor and improve this site. You can control many aspects of the site. The monitoring method you choose is dependent on your goals.
For example, generating leads through a website can be done by analysing the time spent on a site, clickthrough rates and conversions.
You might find monitoring aspects of your web page helpful. It would be wise to choose the best metrics according to your site goals.
What are the benefits of Website Management?
Having a website created and then leaving it up without maintaining it is a recipe for disaster. Amongst other things, updating things like website themes and plugins is crucial to the successful running of your website.
Improve user and customer experience
When it comes to marketing a new product/service to your clients it is vital to properly manage the content.
When a site is outdated or has no functionality, it can lose a lot. 88% of consumers are researching companies on the Internet before they make their purchase.
Websites should be maintained in the best possible manner so that they will always look nice. These qualities improve customer experiences and help in business growth.
Stay ahead of the competition
With online competition, it can be tough to stay on top of trends.
Using websites is difficult to remain in front of and be competitive with a company that lacks a good web management system.
You may have an excellent website. Often the competitors are caught by these trends and can outperform their designs by months.
The website can be maintained promptly by effectively managing the website without having to make changes to it every 1-2 years.
Instead of competing with other companies in your niche, you should take action by creating an attractive, scalable website that will attract more clients.
Maximise your marketing efforts
All too frequently we work with clients with a marketing problems. Maybe the company is using an outdated website or sending new clients to a hacked website. You would find it surprising how prevalent these are.
Sadly, some businesses neglect their website yet get traffic. Using poorly maintained websites can cause you to send traffic to broken sites without noticing the problem.
Proper website management involves checking monitoring and fixing functions to prevent wasted marketing dollars from being spent on advertising.
Keep your data safe
The most crucial aspect of website management is data security. However, the security on websites can take several forms and the best option to take is to back up your website files and databases regularly.
Keep these details in an independent system for the protection of the information.
Moreover, you can ensure your websites are protected against viruses and malware by putting in place security procedures to protect them and prevent them from accessing your information.
Often businesses underestimate their chances of being attacked. Your website is incredibly vulnerable to brute-force threats every day.
Protect your reputation
All business owners want a good reputation.
It has always been an easy way to showcase your reputation on a website for potential clients. Unfortunately, the website that you use could quickly ruin your reputation.
A quick-loading site might get a good proportion of your customer traffic to another business competitor. If your site is compromised, it could redirect your users to a fraudulent website or another unauthorised websites.
How will this affect my reputation? Maintaining your online presence is critical to maintaining a good customer relationship.
10 steps to Managing your small Business’ website
Website management services can be expensive, You can make the website management process easier by making sure all of the below is sorted.
Create backups
It is possible that everything could happen on your website at any time. Whenever it happens, the website must be restored.
Backups can be done every single month and that’s a good thing. Backup is a lot easier every week. When changing your website regularly, you must keep a monthly backup.
You wrote an amazing blog post you are destined to publish. However, when looking at the previews, the templates show some design defects.
These images seem to be small or unreachable. So it can be fixed using the templates settings. It’s a problem that doesn’t have to go away or be fixed, it gets worse.
Updates to plugins
The update of plugins is identical to a theme update.
You also want to ensure the plugin is kept at a minimum. Your theme does not allow for embeds for your Instagram page on your site. It’s dumb. It’s like they need their visitors’ eyes on what they have at lunch today.
You go to a plugin marketplace, search “Instagram “ and you will find thousands of Instagram galleries to pick up. Once you have explored more you’ll be able to find an entirely free product.
You put the plugin on your website and you can see the glamour from your new Instagram photos on your site.
Check on the analytics
It’s a good idea to be aware of your website for effective website management.
Specifically, the user needs to know what is going on in their interactions. Google Analytics is a free tool for analysing websites and their content in a simple way.
If you want technical knowledge, you can use advanced analytical tools such as heat mapping.
Create engaging content
Content is anything you post on the internet, and it can be consumed through text, images, videos or podcasts.
Blog posts are often the source of content, but you can connect with an audience using videos, downloads, or webinars.
Content is essential for the generation of leads to your website and also good for having more traffic for your business. You must make a content plan that understands the needs of the customer and is to be delivered regularly.
Typically, your customers want to understand the importance of keeping security threats away from affecting their small businesses.
Monitor the loading Speed
Your loading speed is critical for your Google rankings. And that will get more important with Google’s Core Vital update.
You must look for new methods of speeding up the site. EXAMPLE: You produced an animated video to display on a web page.
It’s merely around 2 minutes long and you’d think that this could be uploaded directly to your website or a website.
After this, it’s noticeable that the website loads slowly too. You can check out our site by testing the site and verifying the risk. It will load slower than before you embed the video.
Make adjustments
Digital business is about adaptability. You must adapt quickly. With all of this knowledge and insight, you’ll be able to decide how to market and grow your business. You should plan regular periods to review and think about adjustments for your business.
A Quarterly Report can be useful to make the best use of your performance to evaluate the best way to improve yourself. You can opt for an average monthly and maybe weekly schedule — but don’t overdo it.
Monitor traffic
When people move from website to website you should have the data to understand this. Google Analytics and Clicky provide a good way to monitor the bounce rate, the time spent on a page, and so on.
The data will be available to you for answering critical questions directly affecting your business, for example.
5 tools that make website management easier
1. An SEO plugin, e.g RankMath for WordPress
2. Having a simple-to-use website builder
3. Auto-schedule social media posts
4. cPanel:
5. Google Analytics
How much does it cost to manage a website?
Hiring a website manager is probably out of the question, which makes sense when you think of the costs involved.
You can find website management services quite cheap, some start from around £20 per month to around £50 a month, however, the amount of actual service you get for this price will vary.
The most important aspect of running a website is making sure your website stays online and for this, you need to perform continuous updates throughout the year.
We’d say to fully manage a website properly and be proactive you need around 10 hours per month of website management.
Again, the costs for this can vary greatly between providers but look to be spending around £200 for a high-quality, service.
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