Why website maintenance is important

By Pieti Kinnunen

November 7th, 2025

Website maintenance is one of those tasks that often gets pushed to the bottom of the to-do list until something breaks. It’s easy to assume that once a website is up and running, it can be left alone, but in reality, maintaining a site is an ongoing responsibility. From ensuring security updates are applied to optimizing performance, regular maintenance is essential for keeping your website running smoothly and securely. In this post, I'll explore why consistent website maintenance is crucial for your site's health and longevity, and how skipping it can lead to bigger problems down the road.

What is website maintenance

After your website has been developed and is live on the internet, the work doesn’t, or at least it shouldn't, stop there. Just like any other digital tool or platform, a website requires continuous care to keep it running smoothly. This is where website maintenance comes in.

Website maintenance refers to the ongoing process of updating, monitoring, and optimizing a website to ensure it remains functional, secure, and efficient. This includes a range of tasks such as checking for broken links, updating software and plugins, ensuring compatibility with new devices or browsers, and improving site speed. Maintenance can also involve backing up data regularly, performing security checks to guard against threats, and refreshing content to keep the site relevant and engaging. In essence, website maintenance is about keeping your site running smoothly and ensuring it provides a positive experience for visitors. Without it, a website can pretty quickly become outdated, slow, or vulnerable to security risks.

User experience

When we think about website maintenance, it’s easy to focus on the technical aspects and ensuring everything runs smoothly behind the scenes. But the user experience (UX) is just as crucial, and here’s why: what users expect from websites evolves. It’s just like keeping up with the trends in other areas such as fashion. At one time a specific look is in, but at some point it can, and likely will, feel outdated if you’re not paying attention.

As web technologies and browser features continue to evolve, so too do the expectations of your users. Take something as simple as page load speed. A few years ago, a website that took 4-5 seconds to load may have been acceptable. Today, if a page load takes longer than 2 seconds, users might already be clicking away, possibly heading straight to a competitor's site that loads faster. When the page load time increases, the bounce rate also increases drastically. I’ve been there, and I’m sure you have too - waiting for a page to load and just getting impatient.

But it’s not just about speed or design trends. Your competitors’ websites also play a major role in setting user expectations. In a world where users are constantly exposed to fresh and innovative designs, you don’t want your website to look or feel stagnant. Regular updates and maintenance allow you to stay competitive and keep that fresh, modern vibe.

Security

One of the primary reasons regular website maintenance is crucial is security. Websites are frequent targets for cyberattacks, and as technology evolves, new vulnerabilities are discovered regularly. These weaknesses, if left unaddressed, can expose your website to threats such as data breaches, ransomware, or denial of service attacks. Malware and ransomware attacks often exploit outdated software. Regularly maintaining and securing your website is a proactive way to prevent your site from becoming susceptible to malicious activity.

Web applications often, nowadays almost always, rely on various frameworks such as React or Next.js, or content management systems (CMS) such as DatoCMS, Sanity, or Strapi. These platforms are constantly updated by their developers to patch newly discovered security vulnerabilities. These dependencies in turn also have their own dependencies that also suffer from potential vulnerabilities and also get their own patches. When an update or patch is released, it’s usually in response to a specific security issue that could be exploited by hackers if left unresolved.

Failing to apply these updates promptly leaves your website at risk. For example, unpatched vulnerabilities in outdated libraries can serve as entry points for cybercriminals to access sensitive customer data or take control of your site entirely. A routine maintenance schedule ensures that your site’s software is always up to date and that any security vulnerabilities are addressed.

Protecting customer data

For businesses that handle sensitive customer data such as payment information, personal details, or login credentials, ensuring the security of this information is not just an option, but a necessity. If your website is compromised due to outdated security patches, you risk not only losing your customers' trust but also facing legal and financial repercussions, especially with the increasing enforcement of data protection regulations like GDPR.

SEO

Search engines use crawlers to index websites, determining how pages rank for specific keywords. These crawlers are constantly scanning the web to find fresh, relevant content. When you update your website regularly, for example by adding new blog posts, updating pages, or fixing outdated content, you increase the chances of your site being crawled more frequently. This tells search engines that your website is dynamic, keeping your content current and in alignment with the latest trends or information.

Fresh content = more crawling: Regular updates encourage search engines to crawl your site more often, improving indexing speed.

Better crawl budget efficiency: Updated content helps search engines allocate more resources to crawl and index more pages.

Fixing broken links & errors: Addressing 404s and broken links ensures smoother crawling and prevents ranking issues.

Content relevance & keywords: Regularly updating content ensures your site stays aligned with current search trends and keywords.

Mobile optimization: Ongoing maintenance ensures your site is mobile-friendly, improving rankings in mobile-first indexing.

Search engines are constantly updating and changing how they rank different sites in their search results. For example, Google has said that they make significant changes ("core updates", as they call them) multiple times a year. Content and sites that used to perform well in search results at one point will likely not always do well after several changes to the ranking algorithms. Regular maintenance can help you stay on top of the updates and keep you from falling down in the search rankings.

Smaller sites, with little technical setup and dependencies, may not need much regular maintenance in terms of the technical things and security, but staying SEO relevant requires consistent updates to content and possibly refreshes to site styling etc.

How

Website maintenance is not a one-time task, it’s an ongoing process that requires regular monitoring, proactive security checks, and quick response strategies to address any issues that arise. To keep on top of things, I’d recommend setting up alerts for known security vulnerabilities and outdated dependencies. An easy way to do this is for example enabling the bot called GitHub dependabot to receive security alerts and updates for your repository, if you’re using GitHub for your project that is.

Maintaining a website isn’t just about routine updates; it’s also about being proactive when things go wrong. Unexpected downtime, broken forms, slow page loads, or error messages can harm a user’s experience and negatively impact SEO rankings. You can set up different alert and monitoring systems that keep track of your site and make sure its most important features are working correctly.

Unless your website is small enough for you to handle it on your own, website maintenance can be a collaborative effort. One team can handle the technical aspects of maintenance and another can handle the content and design related aspects. Effective website maintenance is a collaborative effort. Hiring a consultancy such as Ikius is a good way to ensure all aspects of your website are handled efficiently and professionally. A good consultancy or an in-house team can set up a proper maintenance plan for your website, so it’s clear who handles what and what should be done if things go wrong, things need updating or your site is potentially compromised.

Conclusion

In conclusion, website maintenance is an ongoing process that ensures your site remains secure, functional, and relevant. Regular updates and optimizations not only prevent security risks but also improve user experience, enhance SEO performance, and keep your website aligned with current technologies and trends. Neglecting maintenance can lead to vulnerabilities, slow performance, and a stale user experience, which may harm both your brand reputation and your business. By proactively managing your website, whether through internal teams or a dedicated consultancy, you can potentially avoid costly overhauls and ensure a smooth, secure, and engaging experience for your visitors.