After months of development, stressing about design and copy, and obsessing over fine details, your website has launched. Congratulations!

(Cue the champagne cork popping sounds!)

Finally, your site is live for the world to explore. Now the fun really begins.

The goal of any website is to get traffic and to deliver a great experience to its visitors. Of course, to do this requires some ongoing maintenance and attention. Unlike a physical product, a website is more akin to a publication. It needs constant monitoring, changes, and unique information to stay relevant. It is a breathing, living, document that requires service long after launch.

Once you have launched your new site, here are three areas that need your ongoing focus.

1) Maintenance & Security

Your website is a living entity, and changes every time technology improves. Each website is built on software (your platform and plugins) that churns out new versions, similar to your smartphone needing updates. The more behind you get on updates, the more problems you may face down the road. To combat this consider:

• Setting up a budget for quarterly maintenance and upgrades. Your website will need updates; it is the nature of the beast. Performing smaller upgrades often proves to be less costly than upgrading your site every few years.
• Reviewing all documentation provided by your developer to get the most out of your website.
• Keeping track of accounts and costs for all providers (Hosting, Domain, Website, Analytics, SMTP, CDN, Plugins, SAAS accounts, Merchant Providers). 
• Using staging environments to test and make sure nothing goes wrong on your live site.
• Limiting access to your website by removing old and unnecessary accounts and changing passwords yearly.

2) Build Your Presence & Ranking

Having a website is like having a ‘virtual address’ for your online office or shop.

Once you build it, your customers need to be able to find you. A lot of the success of your website will depend on being discovered in search engines.

You can increase your online visibility by:

• Ensuring your site has the correct structure in place for optimal SEO. This includes title tags, H1 and H2s, schema and more.
• Writing blogs or sharing videos on your site that use keywords and topics people may use to find you.
• Updating your website continually so that your website stays relevant and doesn’t get stale. This also helps Google to crawl your site regularly for new content.

3) Marketing For Growth

A social media presence can potentially double the traffic for your website. Rather than waiting for Google to rank you, why not share with your audience directly? Social media gives you the perfect opportunity to share your brand story through marketing.

Here are three tips to help get the most from social media:

• Post consistently. Aim for as many platforms as you can feasibly maintain. Remember that one Facebook account with three weekly posts (and good engagement) may be better for you than a single Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook post each week.
  
• Customers might love you, but do you return the favor? Try your hand at email marketing and send useful resources, discounts, or simply say “hello”. By keeping in touch, you are making sure your existing customers remember you.
• Grow your engagement through video. Video marketing is fast becoming an ROI machine. Whether it’s behind-the-scenes stories, tips, and tricks, or how to guides your company has a wealth of knowledge to tap into. A simple vlog once a week is a great way to keep your company front and center with your customers.
  

Remember that a website is like a motor vehicle. It’s there to help you drive your business, but it also needs regular care. If you take a small amount of time every week to add new content, and to update it every few months, it will be able to deliver the results you want.

Need support with your website maintenance? Brandastic is a web development agency based in Costa Mesa, California. We specialize in new website development, website upgrades, and maintenance. Contact us today to ignite your website’s potential.