A good website development team will nurture your company’s website on an ongoing basis. A thoughtful and smart website team will also know your site’s technicalities that need renewals or upgrades and when, it will make sure your online brand is always in its best shape, will keep a close watch on cybersecurity concerns, and much more. Is your website team doing this for you?
At Cazarin Interactive, many of our customers require regular website updates and sophisticated plugins. Some customers don’t know what their website needs. We are here to take care of both.
There are many considerations to factor into your website’s overall health. If you don’t maintain these items, your website will encounter more problems and risks down the road. Just like it is important to nurture your own body with exercise and a healthy diet, it is important to nurture your website for longevity and peak performance. Here are the top five factors necessary to maintain a healthy website.
1. SSL Certificate
An SSL certificate is a critical part of your website. Without an SSL certificate, you are losing website visitors by the minute as they go to your page and see a warning message telling them your site is dangerous.
What is an SSL certificate, anyways?
An SSL certificate is a digital certificate that authenticates your website’s identity. It also enables an encrypted connection, which makes functions like online transactions and customer information that gets filled out on a form secure.
How do I know if I have one?
If you don’t have an SSL certificate, someone should have told you by now that they can’t see your website because it’s unsecured. Otherwise, you can tell if your site or another website has its SSL certificate when you see a padlock icon next to the URL in the address bar. You can also tell if a website is secure if its acronym before the URL is HTTPS. Without an SSL certificate, the S for “secure” is not included, making it just HTTP.
A website without an SSL certificate gives visitors a reason to doubt the credibility and trustworthiness of your business. This reflects poorly on your online brand and ultimately turns customers away. Additionally, some payment processors will not allow your website to receive payments or have a gateway configured unless you have an SSL in place to protect your users. Trust a website team like Cazarin Interactive to get you certified and maintain your validity online.
2. Daily Cloud Backup
If anything goes wrong, it’s extremely important to have a recent backup to revert your website to. This is why Cazarin Interactive offers not monthly, not weekly, but daily backups to all of its customers. Having a backup from just one day prior makes all the difference in all the work done after if anything does go wrong with your website. Our team of website experts has enough experience to know that anything can go wrong with a website, even if you don’t think it’ll happen to you, and that daily backups are the true lifesavers every time.
3. Secure Servers
Any company using shared servers has to be absolutely sure that those servers are secure. Shared hosting is an arrangement in which multiple websites are hosted on one server. This could mean disk space, memory, CPU, and more vital parts of multiple websites are in one space. Many companies share servers because it is a more affordable option than having every website on its own server. If the shared server is not secure, hacks cause a much bigger headache for all websites involved. If another website on your server gets hacked, your site is vulnerable, too.
Cazarin Interactive’s shared servers are secure and monitored to help our customers, and ourselves, avoid these problems.
4. Monthly Patching
Patching includes staying up to date on all your website’s plugins and theme updates. You might think it sounds easy to do this yourself, but it is important to go beyond just updating and testing each of these changes, too. If you deploy these changes before testing them, they can cause a lot of issues on your website that then becomes an extra headache to fix.
Make sure someone is taking documentation logs of this patching, too. It can be a lot to keep track of and no one should be expected to remember when every update was last deployed. A log of these patches also helps so that anyone else who is to take over maintaining the website can see all that has been done. Cazarin Interactive’s Website Nurture Program provides WordPress Monthly Patching so that your website is always up-to-date and glitch-free.
5. ADA Compliance
An ADA-compliant website is not only becoming more and more necessary, but it also is something that simply should be prioritized, anyways. Cazarin Interactive has been helping its customers’ websites become accessible through a widget called accessiBee.
What is an accessible website?
A widget that appears usually at the bottom of accessible websites opens up a menu that allows visitors to choose from many accessibility profiles. For example, they can toggle between options that make your pages adjust to either a vision-impaired profile with enhanced visuals, a seizure-safe profile that clears flashes and reduces color, and many more profile options.
Why does my website need to be ADA-compliant?
Primarily, an accessible website is inclusive for your website visitors and opens up more opportunities for them to learn about your business. A website that allows visitors of all types to enjoy it fully is best for everyone.
Secondly, an ADA-compliant website helps protect your business against lawsuits and fines. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires certain businesses to make accommodations for people with disabilities and this detail is being monitored more and more closely.
A website is like a plant. It has to be nurtured consistently and tended to with care. Building it once and leaving it alone for months can end up being an entire waste of a good website. Look for a trusted website team to make sure all of its wheels are turning, it is safe, it is accessible, and it is working to bring you business.
Contact Cazarin Interactive today to work with a team that is going to nurture your website.
