 So, good afternoon everybody. Thanks for joining me today to discuss why website maintenance is so important. So, I'm going to tell you a little bit about me today. I'm going to keep it short and sweet and jump straight into the presentation. At the end, I will just go through the steps what you need to do to keep your website in tip-top shape. So, like the user said, I started my business now seven years ago, it wasn't updated, with the goal to help businesses with the marketing requirements. My background is in public relations and IT. I do graphic design, web development and marketing. I produce websites, brochures, business cards, anything you might need to get your name and your business out there. I have my own networking group called the Small Business Creative. We have a space on Facebook or Meetup and we get together once a month, just to share ideas, to collaborate, have a laugh and have a bite to eat. I also run workshops teaching business owners about their website and how they can use it to leverage it. From it, I find that business owners are willing to give their money away to any web developer without understanding what's involved to have a website and how does it work. So, who here has got a website? So, how much did you pay for it? Just randomly, how much did you pay for your website? Okay, one, two, three, four. So, the average website is cost between three and 20 grand. I had somebody telling me that they were quoted $90,000 for a website. So, if you're going to spend that amount of money, don't you want to make sure that you get the most out of a website? The average age of a website is about 2.7 years and before it becomes old and redundant, you need to make sure that you're going to get the best out of it. The best way to do that is to maintain it properly. Think of your website as an employee. Do you want a slacker who is slow to start and breaks down at the most inopportune moments or do you want an employee who works for you 24 seven with no sick leave, helps you pay the bills and saves you money and time? All you need to do this is spend as little as five minutes a week to maintain your website. They say that the best things in life are free, but they also say that you get what you pay for. So, why do you think it's important to maintain your website? I'm going to ask the people with the mics, why do you think it's important to maintain your website? So, anybody would like to help me with this? Why do you think? Anybody? Security. Yes, that's a good one. What else? Yeah, that's a good one. Yes, speed is a good one. Yes, SEO is a good one. So, you all know why it's important, but I'll go through the reasons. Basically, to keep your site safe, like you said, and choose the smooth operation of your website. Get some respect from Google. That's an important one. Use experience, speed. It helps with, it will fix unusable features, broken links and 404 errors, and it will prevent damage to your website's integrity and damage to your brand. So, we will look at these important steps to a little bit more, but do you know that only 23% of small business owners update their sites each year? So, let's start. Keeping your website safe. By doing your maintenance, you will protect your website against viruses and potential hacking. Hackers prey on non-suspecting website owners, knowing that they don't update their sites regularly. This is one of the reasons, WordPress and plugin developers update their software. They continuously trying to make their product better for you, so it doesn't get hacked. It's important to update all your plugins, your themes, your translations, your WordPress software to cover all your bases. A good tip here is to have, if you have a lot of plugins to update, is update six at a time. That way you prevent the server falling over and you have to wait before you can go back in and fix the problem. If I think statistic is that over 39, sorry, if I think statistic is that cyber attack occurs every 39 seconds and WordPress is one of the most targeted platforms in the world as WordPress has over 60% market share, followed by 3%. Another frightening statistic from friendly finder sites. You know what's friend finder site? This is your social media accounts. In 2017, 412 million users got hacked. I recently had the experience with Netflix. Anybody else have Netflix again? I got hacked from somebody in Croatia and they went in and they go to the top tier of the subscription and I got the notification from Netflix. We changed the purchase and we thought it's all gone now. Two weeks later I got my credit card statement and he discovered I'm now being charged $19 every month. I spoke to Netflix and they said they're not going to refund me the money because it's between you and your bank. So they taken them out of the equation. So there are over 148 million Netflix subscribers and the average price of $15 per subscription, I think they can make security one of the most important factors. This is the cases that will change the way the world works. Consumers hate being hacked. And the website owner has the responsibility to ensure that their website is safe for the users to use. Next point. To ensure the smooth operation of your website. These days it's all about user experience. In fact, Google will rank a site higher if it has a much better user experience. Slow videos or videos that's not working at all could be related to an outdated slash player. Nothing is more frustrating to a user than looking for something on a website and the links are not working or the video takes forever to load. It's the fastest way to ensure that people leave your site and never comes back. If you're unsure about what I'm going through please just stop me and ask a question. So Google will show you some respect. Google wants to rank websites that has the most relevant and up-to-date information on their search engine results page. They may even de-index your website if it hasn't been updated recently enough and if they suspect that it might be infected by malware. You must keep your website regularly updated with current content, news, keywords and articles in order for it to rank well with Google. So you can expect to have better rankings when you can show that you care about your website, that the information gets regularly updated and that there's no broken links in outdated software. Like I said before it's all about user experience. If you don't maintain your website it will affect how a user will experience your fight. This one bad experience is enough for a user to click away and they will more than likely never return. So how a user sees your website is as important as it influences the perception which can affect your reputation, your brand, your credibility. As Steve Jobs said start with the customer experience and then work your way back to the technology. Is there anybody here who has a bad experience with the website? Are you willing to go back to that website? Not likely. So we now get to speed. Speed is one of the key issues of a website. Websites that are not maintained gradually get slower over time to load and it has to work as it has to work through all the coding. So if you have a look at the stats 47% of consumers expect a website to load in two seconds or less. 40% will abandon a site if it takes more than three seconds to load. And a one second delay will decrease the customer satisfaction by 16%. So that's pretty frightening to think about it. Websites today are lean and mean and there's no excess coding. Gone are the days for big clunky starts. Plugins and themes are stripped to the bare minimum to ensure that the website loads in less than three seconds. What happens if you don't update your theme forever? It gets slower. Designers notice and they will concentrate on getting their themes as sleek and as fast as possible. Every second counts. But how long is a second? Well, I think that depends on who you ask. As Benjamin Franklin used to say, time is money. A one second delay in a page responsiveness can reduce conversion up to 7%. If you have an e-commerce site making $100,000 a day, one second can lead to $2.5 million. So it can cost you a lot. Now we look at the unusable features. So if you don't maintain your website and you don't do the updates, the features on your website will eventually become unusable. So pictures might not come up. Videos will stop working like we said before. Plugins will stop working as they become obsolete. There's 54,000 plugins. So they are continuously getting obsolete. So designers decided to work on new stuff and they just don't support the old plugins anymore. So when you purchase your website for 20K or 90K like somebody did with all the bells and whistles, and don't maintain it, it will eventually stop working altogether. You might see the warnings or you might not. If you maintain your website, you will know exactly which plugins are working and which are not. So now we're going to look at the broken links in 404 errors. So everybody know what's a broken link? So basically what it is, if you click on it, it just gives you a 404 saying the base doesn't work. So one of the most annoying things for your website or for your prospective customer is a website with broken links. Imagine the customer making a decision to buy your product and after pressing the buy button only gets a 404 error. Customers expect better and they will more likely move to a website that's being looked after and cared for. Remember back in the 1990s when it was the coolest thing, if you can just get onto the internet, let alone having a website, now people has moved past this and they expect a whole new level of customer service. Besides letting your customer down, broken links can actually harm your SEO. Ranking Google and other search engines continuously crawl your site and if they came across a broken link, they will record it and next time somebody search for that particular product, they will refer to a website that's actually working. So we get to website integrity and band protection. If you have updated content on your website, what does it say to your customers? Will they come back once they know that you don't update the information? So don't risk your reputation without the content, spelling and grammar errors, keyword stuffing, we all know what's keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing. So basically where you just put all your keywords in one paragraph and hope everything goes well. Promising things you can't deliver. Frustrated users with broken links and a slow loading site. Or putting your user information at risk and sites being hacked. So we have to note in the digitally connected world, the byte of days, they can either boost or bite your brand. So be mindful when you do your website's updates. So what does it entail? How do you keep your website at the tip top step? Check all the pages are loading without errors. So if you have to physically go through all the pages on your website, do it. It will just give you that piece of mind that everything is working. Make sure your backup is working. The golden rule of backups have at least two copies on your website. One on your PC and one hard copy. Who does hard copy backups of their websites? Well done. I guarantee you that's something that happens. You can't remember what you did six months ago. Update all your web press software, plugins, translations, whatever is available. Update it. Check that all your forms are working. Remove any spam comments from your pages and posts. Fix the broken links. How do you fix the broken links? You get plugins that actually checks if there is broken links on your site. And it's a matter of ticking a box and it's fixed. So have a look. There's plenty of plugins that check all the broken links on your site. Check your content and remove any outdated information. Is there anything I forgot to mention? It doesn't look like it. So how do you do it? Set a site 30 minutes each week for putting it in your diary so you know that it's coming up and you need to do it. If you're busy, outsource it. There's plenty of VAs who will only die for the opportunity to update your site for you. If you're not sure how to do it, ask your web developer. It's part of their function to teach you how to use your site. Look it up on the net. There is hundreds of videos that shows you exactly step-by-step how to maintain your website. Maintenance. What maintenance? So there you have it folks. I can carry on preaching until the sun comes up tomorrow. But it's your choice and the responsibility is yours. You can either have a brilliant website that serves for years or you can leave it to the dogs and face the consequences. You decide. Any questions? Hi. I just discovered I've got no broken links apparently when I run it through the broken link checker and everything like that. But I was putting a redirect in for a page for a 301 and I just clicked on this tab that said 404 errors and I've got 90,000 of them. This has only happened on Thursday. And I was like, oh, what do I do? Okay, so your broken link checker, it should show you exactly where the broken links is. Does it give you a list of ... Does it give you the option to repair it there and then? No. A lot of them are like Apple icons. They're all really, yeah, and they're coming in sort of every 10 or 15 minutes a new one. So something's crawling. I don't know. I'm not technical enough. Okay, so if you want to have a word to be afterwards then I can maybe grab your details or speak to your website developer, the person in the major site, because there might be something wrong with the technology somewhere, something feeding the problem. Okay, cool. Thanks. It says walking. Thank you. And thank you for your presentation. What eludes me was you mentioned that you have a small business meeting. Whereabouts are you and when does that occur? So I have my meeting in Manly at Monty's place. And it's usually the last Thursday of the month between 10 to 12, a great bunch of business owners. So if you're in the area, please come and pop by. Plenty of food, plenty of laughter. Are you on Facebook or meetups? Yes, we're on both. So just look up the small business creative and I'll add you in once you apply. Thank you. Anybody else? Going, going, gone. There's some more, yeah. What's your clause of Queensland? Queensland, sorry. I'm moving from a cost to a value-based structure of my business. I'm a web designer. And I've been thinking about offering maintenance packages because I have the experience, even clients first say, yes, we want to do maintenance ourselves. It's not happening at the end of the day. No one has time to do this. So I'm at the moment thinking what do you recommend or if maybe someone else can help me. Is it better to do a monthly package, a quarterly package every six months? And I've seen online a bit of research. So it's a huge variety of maintenance programs. Some are just something like $40 an hour to up to $500 on a monthly basis. It depends on what you're going to offer and be clear with it to the person who's going to buy the package, exactly what is it going to entail. And then I think monthly is a good start. Monthly? If monthly doesn't work, you will probably see it within the first couple of months. Then go to yearly. I mean speak to the people who is purchasing this package from you. And ask them what would they feel comfortable on doing. Is it easier for them to do it once a year? Or every month? Any final questions? No? Yes? Can you give us some examples of what would allude to the fact that you haven't done some maintenance and it's gone paycheck? Well the cycle goes slower. So it will take a long time to load. Also some of the user functionality won't work. Like if you have a contact sheet it might not send the message out. So has a client come back to you and said I'm not happy and therefore shut down your account or anything like that to the worst of being hacked? It can. It just depends on how the plugin works. If it's not being supported anymore it will get to a stage where the links and everything will just stop working. And depending on the functionality it might just not do what the user expected to do. So what I was asking was have you had any personal experience where it has cost you dearly in not doing the maintenance for a number of sites or just a site? Well I had a client who does self-sales for weddings. She did not do updates. I mean every time I go into a site there's like mountains of updates to do. And she got hacked. And if she runs one wedding a week, she starts up one wedding a week, a wedding cost like three four thousand dollars full flowers. In the long run she could have lost like three thousand dollars for the site being down due to it being hacked. So it pays to retain your site. Thank you. Anybody else? Thank you very much Marty. Thank you everybody.