Your website is never finished. If all you do is create one and forget about it your doomed to fail.

Here are four reasons why web maintenance is important:

1. To keep visitors interested

As visitors become familiar with your site they will see you as trustworthy and are more likely to send their business your way. Fresh material added regularly to your site keeps visitors coming back to see what’s new. Routinely feature creative new content, text, graphics or images, to build repeat visitors.

2. To add new products, services or features

Evolving your web site means it’s more likely to attract new and returning customers.

3. To maintain your Google rankings

Google gives higher rankings to web sites that are updated regularly because they want to present the best quality content to their customers.

4. To keep your website working well

When your web site is well maintained links to external web sites will continue to work, images load and emails function. This means customers can find what they are looking for quickly and easily and are more likely to buy from you. Also, hackers are constantly looking for exploits and outdated websites are a prime target. They find vulnerabilities in older software all the time. If these vulnerabilities aren’t fixed with regular updates, it’s just a matter of time before they get in.

Maintenance for a small site may take as little as a few hours a month. A large site may be a full-time job to maintain.