As we live in the internet age, it is a safe assumption that your bridal business has a website. How effective that website is in attracting visitors, who in turn become prospects and ultimately clients, will depend on many factors. The first will be how much traffic the website gets via organic means, such as SEO or paid traffic programs, such as Pay Per Click on Google or Facebook, for example.

Once traffic reaches your website, it is a matter of how well it has been designed. A well-designed website will keep visitors there for a reasonable amount of time, will also be easy to navigate, and will ultimately have clear calls to action, such as telephoning your business or entering details such as a name and an email address.

Conversely, a poorly designed website causes visitors to leave almost immediately and confusion due to no clear navigational menus. It will also have unclear or no calls to action and possibly malfunction due to a technical or coding issue. This last problem can be the death knell for a website’s performance and in particular, its ranking on Google. The tragedy is that technical issues and other problems can so easily be avoided if only website maintenance was in place.

What Is Website Maintenance?

Whilst the specific tasks will differ from other things that require maintenance, such as a car, a computer, or machinery, the definition of website maintenance is similar. That is, website maintenance is a series of tasks and processes that keep websites running smoothly, perform optimally, and avoid problems that might cause the website not to function properly.

The key to website maintenance is that it should be done regularly, mainly because updates to many of the tools and software which allow the website to operate as it should, are often updated. Prime examples are the core platform for the website such as WordPress and plugins that provide additional functionality.

Why Is Website Maintenance So Important To Bridal Websites?

Imagine you did not maintain your car properly. What do think will eventually happen? If you answered that the car could break down then you would be correct, and that is the core reason why your bridal website needs maintenance. The issue with your website developing faults is that there are so many ways this can impact how your website performs and that can be disastrous to your bridal business, especially if it depends on online customers.

The list of problems is almost endless but a few of the more serious examples include:

• Website not loading
• Website loading slowly
• Website not displaying properly
• Functions within the website not working
• Website causing the browser to crash
• Visitors see on-screen warnings

Those are just a few ways that problems can manifest due to a website not being maintained, but the damage goes further and gets more serious. If any of these happen, it will negatively impact how both visitors and search engines evaluate your website and your bridal business

Those visitors will almost certainly leave your website quickly and likely avoid it forever, meaning they never return to become a client. Worse, they may tell others by posting on social media or simply word of mouth,  so not only have you lost them as a client, you have lost many others too.

As for the search engines, and especially  Google, they have a built-in bias against websites that do not perform or function properly and thus provide visitors with a poor experience. The user experience (UX) is uppermost in how search engine algorithms rank websites, so if your website is providing an appalling UX, its ranking will plummet meaning traffic from search engines comes almost to a stop.

None of these negative consequences needs to happen and will not happen if you set up a maintenance plan for your website. This can be done either when your website is first designed or by contacting the web design company that created it, who most likely will have a website maintenance service that can keep your bridal website functioning perfectly.