With rapidly evolving online trends and consumer preferences, it can be difficult for companies to keep up.
Even if you’ve just launched large redesign, you may already have the urge to make more tweaks to your website based on new trends or information.
The days of creating static websites that last for years are disappearing. To keep up with the competition, you’ll want to continuously evolve your website as time goes on.
Unfortunately, this is no easy feat for small and medium-sized businesses.
Constantly revamping webpages, launching new content, and adding new site features can drain your team’s resources, energy, and focus.
This is why many companies are choosing to outsource their website management as a more cost-effective solution that saves you time and gives you access to experts.
In this post, we’ll go into great detail about how outsourcing website management works and when it might be a good option for you.
Outsourcing vs. Hiring In-House for Website Management
When hiring help for your website, there are two options: outsourcing and in-house.
You may already be relying on your in-house employees to handle your website management. In most cases, this could be someone on your marketing or IT team.
Although this may seem like a good responsibility for them, we often find that they aren’t a great fit for the job.
Marketing experts lack the technical expertise and best practices to keep your website running optimally, meanwhile IT professionals don’t usually have an eye for design or user experience.
If you’re company is large enough, hiring a full in-house team to match these skill sets can be cost-effective, but for most companies that simply isn’t the case.
That’s why outsourcing can be more affordable and effective for small and medium-sized businesses.
When outsourcing your website maintenance, you’ll gain access to a team of expert developers and designers who are ready to dive into your website project. Best of all, it only costs a fraction of what it would take to hire these professionals in-house.
10 Reasons to Start Outsourcing for Your Website
When deciding if outsourcing website management is right for you, you should assess your current situation.
Take a look at your resources, website health, competitor websites, and employees to see if website management is causing a bottleneck in your business.
Below we’ll discuss 10 reasons why you should consider outsourcing your website management.
1. You Don’t Have Enough Time
One of the biggest reasons why companies consider outsourcing website management is to save time.
Whether it’s you or members of your team, a lack of time can cause all sorts of problems for your business because you’ll have to start neglecting tasks that are deemed less important than others.
This means that your website projects and tasks are rushed, or not completed at all. Over time, these issues result in a poorly optimized website that provides a bad experience for users.
Since your website is an important reflection of your company, it’s important to keep it well-managed.
2. You Don’t Have Enough Expertise
Although you may be getting by, perhaps your expertise is limiting you or taking too much of your time.
If you’re not experienced with websites, a simple task will take you much longer than it would take an expert. You may spend hours researching how to do something that an expert could figure out within a few minutes.
Additionally, a lack of expertise may limit your vision from being represented to its fullest potential on your website.
Perhaps you’ve had design ideas or functionality that you’re not sure how to implement. Outsourcing your website management will give you the team you need to make your project come to life.
3. Website Downtime Is Increasing
“Website down again?”
If this is a common occurrence for you, maybe you’ve grown accustomed to it. However, this is not normal! Website downtime should be infrequent and short-lived.
Frequent website downtime is a sign that your website is not being managed and maintained properly. This often occurs if you’re not managing server resources appropriately or failing to keep software versions compatible and up to date.
4. Your Design Is Outdated
Keeping up with the latest design trends is no easy feat. It may seem like your competitors are always onto the next trend and you can’t keep up.
Without the proper resources, you may not be able to stay ahead of design trends. Since people form 75% of their judgment on a website’s credibility purely based on its aesthetics, managing your site design proactively is very important (University of Surrey).
5. Your Content Is Outdated
Updating your website’s content can be a difficult task to keep up with.
The most important elements of your website content include your contact information, services page, pricing information, and blog. If this information is outdated, it may cause confusion for your users.
If you’re struggling to keep your content relevant and up to date, outsourcing your website management could be a great option for you.
6. Your Website Has Errors
There’s no doubt that website errors negatively affect your business and customers.
When your site experiences an error, your customers become confused and may lose trust in your company for not keeping your website in proper shape. Additionally, the urgency of unexpected website errors will stress out your team as you scramble to get it repaired as soon as possible.
If you’re always running into website errors, it’s likely that you’re not taking proper care of your website. Outsourcing your website management will help you proactively maintain your website to reduce critical errors.
7. Numerous Software Updates Are Outstanding
Have you ever noticed a large number of updates available for your website’s plugins?
If you’re overloaded with other website tasks, it’s easy to procrastinate with your software updates. However, software updates are more important that you might think.
Keeping your website’s software up to date will patch security flaws, improve performance, add new features, and maintain compatibility with other software versions.
Outsourcing your website management can help you stay on top of these software updates.
8. Your Website Is Loading Slowly
Struggling with slow pages?
Since, the first five seconds of page-load time have the highest impact on conversion rates, it should not be ignored (source).
When you’re overwhelmed with website management, keeping up with your page loading speed is a task you might push into the future. However, it is one of the most important factors determining user experience.
Outsourcing your website management can help you prioritize your page loading optimization so you can provide the best user experience possible (and get more leads!).
9. Your Team Is Getting Distracted From Their Core Responsibilities
Oftentimes the role of website management is placed on the business owner, marketing team, IT department, or some other internal role that isn’t fully devoted to the job.
This means that your team’s attention in split, which makes them less effective overall.
Hiring someone in-house with the primary responsibility of website management isn’t a cost-efficient option for most companies either.
That’s why outsourcing your website management can be great if your team is getting distracted from their other responsibilities. You’ll be able to hire a freelancer or agency dedicated to the job at a fraction of the cost of hiring in-house.
Recommended Read: Hiring a Website Manager for Your Business
10. You Don’t Have a Website Yet
If you haven’t even started your website yet, outsourcing is a great place to start!
The vast majority of companies outsource their website to an agency so the job can get done right. However, many web developers do not continually manage the site after building it.
Outsourcing your website design and management to a reliable provider can you help maintain the lifespan of your website investment for years to come!
How Does Outsourcing Website Management Work?
Let’s get into more details about how outsourcing website management works.
There are two options for hiring a website manager externally:
- Website management agency
- Freelancer
A website management agency is an external team of experts who specialize in website management. With this option, you’ll get the most expertise per dollar while dealing with the highest degree of professionalism. An agency will adapt to your project quickly because they deal with a wide variety of businesses on a daily basis.
A freelancer is an individual developer that handles your website management on a contract basis. This may be more flexible than an agency, but they might not have the same level of expertise that an agency would. Also, there may be some training needed to familiarize the freelancer with your company.
You should consider both options carefully before outsourcing your website management. That’s why we’ve written a full guide for hiring a website manager.
6 Benefits of Outsourcing Your Website Management
Now that you understand how website management outsourcing works, let’s talk about the tangible benefits of doing so.
Below we’ve listed six of the best ways that your company can benefit from outsourcing website management.
1. Free Up Department Resources
The responsibility of website management is usually placed on existing departments that aren’t a great fit for the job, such as marketing or IT.
Although these departments seem like a good fit for the job, website management is actually a distraction from their core duties.
By outsourcing your website management, you’ll be able to free up these internal resources so your departments can be more focused and effective.
2. Improve User Experience
Your website serves several important functions in your business, such as generating leads, attracting new hires, and providing information to existing customers.
One of the most important factors influencing the success of these functions is the experience that your users have on your site. In fact, 88% of consumers are less likely to return to a site with bad user experience.
Outsourcing your website management will grant you access to a team of experts who will manage and maintain your website to provide the best user experience possible.
3. Keep Your Data Protected
Security is an important element of website management.
There are many different activities involved with website security, but the basics involve website backups, firewall protection, and 24/7 file monitoring.
When you outsource your website management, you’ll have the experts you need to monitor and protect your website from malicious users.
4. Stay Ahead of the Competition
Keeping up with the latest trends is not easy.
When you outsource website management to an agency, you will have the resources you need to keep your website up to date with the latest design and development trends.
Since an agency deals with many different businesses on a daily basis, they’ll have the experience needed to take your site to the next level so you can stay ahead of the competition.
5. Reduce Downtime and Errors
If your site experiences frequent downtime or critical errors, your website management is not up to par.
Proactively maintenance will minimize the occurrences of these issues, which can ultimately help you provide a better experience to users and maximize lead flow.
Outsourcing your website management will help reduce website downtime and errors so you can continue satisfying customers without interruption.
6. Maximize Marketing Efforts
It’s possible that you’re throwing marketing dollars down the drain!
Perhaps you’re running ads to a landing page with a broken lead form, or even sending your social media followers to a hacked website. You’d be surprised how often this happens.
Unfortunately, many companies do not regularly inspect their website for these types of issues. They simply don’t have the time or resources to do so.
That’s why outsourcing your website management can help you maximize your marketing efforts. A website management agency will inspect the critical functions of your website to ensure they are getting the job done.
