Too often business owners ignore the technical health of their website out of sight and out of mind until they have a problem. Customers find out about broken pages and unsecured forms, while you get messages about the inability to load your page or unsafe browser warnings. Most of the time, issues are stealth costs that damage your earnings long before you found out and took action.
For the sake of simplicity, the technical health of a working website can be reduced to two considerations: how secure are you, and how fast are you? Unfortunately, speed and security come with maintenance, and most business owners don’t think they are critical to the bottom line. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Security and speed matters to potential customers finding you and most importantly, trusting you. Unsecured websites can be dangerous to your customers and expose you to avoidable legal problems.
Why not fixing this doesn’t just hurt your website
When it comes to search, page speed was a ranked factor even before Google was kind enough to explain that they aren’t going to direct traffic to a site that Google felt was unsafe. That includes a slow site or a malicious site. Customers’ frustrations aside, an unsecured site or slow site isn’t just an annoyance, it does not show up in search at all. If you have Search set as your primary advertising channel, that unchecked technical problem has probably been the reason your downward trend in traffic has been slow and steady with no explanation for the past several months.
Rapport and trust are somewhat similar, the main difference being speed and visibility. If a page takes eight seconds to load or if visitors receive browser danger warnings, they won’t stick around to see if you’re trustworthy. They will leave and not tell you why. Analytics might blink up a bounce, or if you aren’t focused, you may get no data at all. The inquiries and sales you lose this way never become complaints; they become silence.
The exposure most owners don’t consider until it’s too late is legal and data risk. Your site has a contact form; you have a booking system; you have an online shopping cart. You have a responsibility under the UK GDPR for how you store and protect customer data. If your site has unprotected form submissions or customer data stored on hot sites, then it is a technical and legal failure, and it will cost you money and harm your good name, especially if your customer data is involved.
Security and performance are different problems with the same effect
Security and performance are not the same, although they are often treated as if they are. Security is concerned with whether your site has been hacked, or whether malicious code is installed on your site. Performance is concerned with whether your site is fast enough to keep visitors engaged and to satisfy search engines, which is a completely different problem and often is caused by the way a site is built and what it is connected to.
Both security and performance, if left unaddressed, impact the same thing. That is, fewer visitors, eroding trust, and lower conversions. Security and performance issues are actually fundamentally different. Treating them as one and the same leads to a lack of understanding and is avoided.
What tends to go unnoticed
There are a few telltale signs of a small business site that has gone neglected for too long. Site plugins and themes get outdated. When sites are launched, there are no gaps, but over time, outdated plugins and themes create security gaps. Contact forms and booking devices get integrated with a CRM or CMS. No one examines what impacts page load time for a growing business. No one takes responsibility for any of the described problems because it was never anyone’s job after the original site developer left.
None of this is about a budget or technology shortage. This is about knowing what you’re looking at and describing it. For example, if you don’t know what you’re looking at, you say, “The site is acting up,” and hope the person you’re calling can read your mind.
Deep Dive on Two Specific Areas
For more detailed information, there are two areas I would suggest you look into. The first of these areas is security. This means how you interpret the signs of a site being hacked, rather than having a vague feeling that something isn’t quite right, and, of course, the financial impact of blacklisting and loss of trust that leads to abandoned sales that may cause a breach of GDPR for the organisation. The second area is performance, mainly focused on CRM and CMS integration, as these integrations are some of the more unpredictable causes of slow websites as a business grows. The reasons are more specific than the typical “your site is slow” advice. Both of these areas are covered in great detail in the links to these pages.