If you’ve been thinking about getting a website, you may be wondering about what is the process of website development. Unfortunately, many people get excited about the e-commerce website development process, only to neglect the site in the weeks and months to follow. No matter how much you spend on designing and developing your site, you will need to invest additional time and money in its ongoing maintenance. Simply adding new content occasionally isn’t enough. Rather, website development is, in some ways, a continuous process.
If you neglect your site, you may miss broken links or pages that load really slowly. Very often, customers won’t contact you to tell you that something is wrong. They’ll just go to your competitor’s more user-friendly site. Websites that aren’t maintained usually drop in the search engine rankings and this will have implications for your business. In this article, we’ll highlight some of the things you need to do to ensure that your site continues to function optimally.
Website Maintenance 101
Not every site owner’s maintenance schedule will be the same. However, some of the things that you may need to do include:
- Backing up your content regularly
- Making sure your site is free of spam
- Paying your annual domain renewal fees
- Paying your hosting fees ( businesses typically have yearly plans)
- Analyzing your content, traffic, and conversions and make changes as necessary
If this seems like too much for you to do, you have the option of hiring a web development agency to maintain your website on a monthly basis. This may be the same company that built your site. There are significant advantages to having a monthly maintenance contract, especially if you don’t have the necessary expertise in-house. When going through the website development process steps, this is something you need to consider since it will affect your ongoing costs.
You can choose which services you want the agency to handle on your behalf. Generally, the costs are similar to those outlined in the table below.
| Service | Minimum Cost | Maximum Cost |
| SSL Certificate | Free | $125 monthly |
| Website hosting | $2 monthly | $835 monthly |
| Ongoing technical support | $60 per hour | $100 per hour |
| General upkeep | $15 monthly | $105 monthly |
| Analytics reports | $5 monthly | $15 monthly |
Steps Involved in Continuous Website Improvement
As noted earlier, the e-commerce website development process needs to be ongoing.
In addition to installing updates as they become available, you will need to:
- Attract new visitors to your site
- Improve your conversion rate
- Analyze the behavior of website users
- Make improvements as necessary
This is the only way your website will support your business on an ongoing basis and help you to sell more products and services. A web development agency can provide you with the guidance and technical help you need.
