As we live in the internet age, it’s safe to assume that your bridal business has a website — a great website. Your products and services, which you’re proud of, are displayed in all their flair and glory. You’re attracting potential customers, making a lasting impression, and are on the way to building a brand that will become synonymous with luxury, class, and sophistication.
Your website must be beautiful enough to draw the attention of your demanding customers — brides-to-be. Nothing less than extraordinary will catch their attention, and you know it. For that reason, your website is your online storefront. A representative of everything you have to offer, your pristine service, and high-end standards that tell your brides that they’ve reached the very best.
Once that’s in place, you’re on track to deliver the most sensational experience for brides who’ve dreamt of their wedding day and bridal dress for their entire lives!
However, there’s a problem many bridal dress stores usually don’t anticipate. Your website may be the most beautiful, attractive, and inspiringly designed bridal website to ever exist. However, how effective that website is in attracting visitors, who will ultimately become prospects — and actual paying customers, depends on more than just how pretty your website is.
Let’s look at the many factors that determine whether your online potential customer becomes a customer who chooses to wear your design for their special day.
The first will be how much traffic the website gets via organic means such as SEO. Or you might even have invested in paid traffic programs, such as Pay Per Click on Google or Facebook, for example. Say you’ve got phenomenal results from PPC, and traffic is pouring onto your website. Or you’ve spent months building organic traffic via SEO, and it’s finally turning into high-quality organic traffic. Brides-to-be interested in exploring their options and wanting to browse your beautiful one-of-a-kind bridal dress designs are clicking on your website.
Once traffic lands on your website, it’s a matter of first impressions.
How well has it been designed? That will pique the prospect’s interest and they may decide to stay for a while. A well-designed website will seize visitors’ attention for a good amount of time because it will feature easy navigation menus that enhance the user experience. Moreover, it will have placed well-worded calls to action, such as making a call to book an appointment or gain details, or getting contact information such as name, email address, and nature of interest in the service.
On the other hand, say the visitor encounters a poorly-designed website, which will cause them to quickly go back to search results and choose another bridal dress website. That may be due to many different reasons. Say they got instantly confused because there were no properly planned and executed navigation menus. Say, the website theme did not hit the mark and they felt it didn’t speak to them or wasn’t emotionally compelling enough. It could be a lack of unclear or missing calls to action, or a possible error or malfunction because there was a coding issue or technical problem.
That last problem is exactly what signals the instant deterioration of the website experience. Visitors today are highly complex and with so many options available one click away, they’ll instantly move onto the next website address on their search results page. As a result, search engine algorithms have now deemed your website performance less than optimal, and your quality score tanks on Google, along with rankings.
This absolute tragedy of lost online customers translates to actual sales dollars for your business. If your bridal website had a proper maintenance plan, you could have avoided these technical issues that deteriorated the customer experience.
What Is Website Maintenance?
When we define the website maintenance process, it’s all about doing the necessary work to make sure that the website is up-to-date and capable of delivering a smooth user experience with maximum performance. If your website is well-maintained, the links will work properly at all times — and content will be updated, relevant, and engaging. Additionally, any broken links will be dealt with promptly. Then there are some basic tasks within the process of website maintenance, such as regular backup and monitoring site speed and performance at regular intervals.
You might be thinking, well, your website is in good shape, looks great, and was done by a professional. However, the issue most bridal dress businesses don’t realize is that website maintenance is a constant process. It is not a one-time task. Your website integrates software and tools that now may be outdated, and don’t perform as well as they once did. Prime examples are the core platform for the website such as WordPress and plugins that provide additional functionality.
Why Is Website Maintenance So Important To Bridal Websites?
Imagine you did not maintain your car properly. What do you think will eventually happen? If you answered that the car could break down then you would be correct, and that is the core reason why your bridal website needs maintenance. Once your website develops faults, there are so many ways this can impact how your website performs. That occurrence can be disastrous to your bridal business, especially if it depends on online customers to drive revenue and sales.
The list of problems your potential customers can encounter is pretty much endless, but a few of the more serious examples include:
- A website not loading at all
- The website load speed is too slow
- The website is not displaying images and text properly
- Essential functions within the website fail to work
- The website causing the browser to crash
- Visitors see on-screen warnings and errors
Those are just a few ways that problems can manifest due to a website not being maintained, but the damage rises further and gets more serious. If any of these happen, it will negatively impact how visitors and search engines evaluate your website and your bridal business.
Those visitors will almost certainly leave your website quickly and likely avoid it forever, meaning they never return to become a client. And why would they? Your website was their first impression of you, and now they think it’s subpar experience translated to subpar products and services.
Worse, you will lose out on the opportunities that can be gained via word-of-mouth marketing. It might get worse. Visitors who have experienced your website may share their negative experiences with others by posting on social media or word of mouth. Not only have you lost them as a client, you have lost many other potential clients, too.
As for search engines, and especially Google, they have a built-in bias against websites that do not perform well or function properly and thus provide visitors with a poor experience. The user experience (UX) is uppermost in how search engine algorithms rank websites. So, if your website is providing an appalling UX, Google knows. As a result, its ranking for your business will plummet — meaning traffic from search engines comes almost to a stop.
All of the above-mentioned negative consequences don’t need to happen. They are 100% avoidable with a robust maintenance plan for your website. This plan can be crafted by the original website designer or design firm. If it wasn’t delivered alongside the website design, you can also reach out to the web design company that created it. They will likely have a website maintenance service that can keep your bridal website functioning perfectly.
Once your website is launched for your bridal business, you must avoid the occurrence of technical issues. You also need to consistently make updates to optimize the user experience that will keep your website on the good books of Google algorithms, so it continues to rank well on search engine results pages (SERPs) and attract visitors. All of this can be done by regularly maintaining your website. It might seem daunting to commit to putting in that extent of consistent work effort and time into your website, but it is essential.
Here are only some of the different types of web maintenance aspects that you need to note down:
- Security updates to address potential vulnerabilities
- Plugin and theme updates for optimized website functionality
- Content updates for accuracy and relevancy
- Disaster recovery planning with regular backup
- Optimize site speed and responsiveness
- Security scanning for potential threats
- User account management
- Test website accessibility and mobile website experience
- Seo monitoring for ranking, backlinks, and traffic
Of course, it doesn’t hurt to take on the task of website maintenance by yourself.
However, it is always a great idea to employ a website developer who has the knowledge and skills to ensure website maintenance is tackled expertly.
For obvious reasons, your bridal business simply cannot take the risk of delivering a poorly performing website and destroying all your hard-earned reputation and work. Furthermore, it’s important to remember that website maintenance isn’t exactly an easy feat. It requires a lot of time, effort, and technical aptitude, which a developer might be more equipped to handle. DIY website maintenance is usually primed for errors and mistakes.
You think you’re saving money on a maintenance professional, but the mistakes you make could cost you potentially thousands of dollars on lost sales and business.
Bridal businesses that budget for website maintenance usually perform best in the industry.
They view this cost as part of the website development process, and in turn, avoid many occurrences of lost sales and business down the line.
The cost of maintenance is a welcome liability when you have the knowledge that your website is always performing at its very best, retaining the attention and interest of website visitors and delivering a great experience.
