Is Maintaining a Behavioral Health Care Website by Yourself the Right Idea?

Whether you should maintain your website by yourself is a decision every behavioral health care provider must make for themselves. In truth, there’s no right or wrong answer. To better understand whether that’s the best course of action for your facility, it’ll be necessary to look at several factors.

It’s only natural to think that maintaining your website by yourself makes sense. After all, it’s the best way to keep total control, and it seems like a good way to save money. If you aren’t paying someone else to maintain it, your website costs you less, right? For behavioral health care centers with tight budgets, this would appear especially attractive.

Trying to be cost effective, however, may not be as easy as it seems. When you create a website, it takes a considerable amount of time, which you may not necessarily have—that is, time that you can’t afford to take away from other things in order to do it. This also assumes that you have the in-house talent available to design and build a cutting-edge professional website. Of course, designing a website is one thing, and maintaining it is another.

Some companies launching websites don’t fully appreciate what an ongoing commitment their websites will be. However, it doesn’t take them long to figure this out. As a result, few businesses today attempt to maintain their own websites or handle technical support issues. They realize that leaving these tasks to industry-knowledgeable digital marketing professionals simply makes more sense.

Five Reasons to Let Digital Marketing Experts Maintain Your Website

As you contemplate whether to maintain your own website, keep in mind what’s involved. Responsibilities include the following areas.

1. Keeping Your Website Backed up

Although it’s common knowledge that backing up your website is important, a surprising number of businesses aren’t good about actually doing it routinely. Without a backup schedule that is strictly adhered to, website owners risk losing possibly everything if their website crashes. The thought of having to start over from scratch should terrify any website owner enough to make certain that backups happen.

2. Consistently Uploading New Content

When a website goes online, the work has only just started. To remain relevant to viewers, content needs to be constantly added to your website. Whether it’s landing pages or blogs, new content is how you show to viewers that your website is worth investigating more than once. Keep in mind that Google also wants to see websites continually refresh content. That proves to the search engine that your website is worthy of receiving a high ranking. Websites with stale and out-of-date content are destined to lose their Google ranking. Don’t make that mistake.

3. Periodically Enhancing the Look of Your Website

A website is never actually “finished”; it’s evolving constantly. Part of that evolution involves the look of your website. Have you ever been on a website and it looks like it was designed a long, long time ago? That’s the kiss of death for website success.

You never want viewers thinking that about your behavioral health care website. The way to avoid it is by accepting the fact that your website design needs to change every few years. Tastes change, technology changes, and both are reflected in website design. Always remain current in terms of the look of your website.

4. Ensuring Your Plugins Are Updated

WordPress is a hugely popular content management system due to the number of plugins that are available. For those who aren’t in the know, plugins are small programs that add functionality to WordPress sites. The selection of plugins for WordPress is enormous and many are provided at no cost to web designers.

Plugins aren’t a “one and done” thing; they have to be updated on a regular basis. This is something that a lot of companies forget about, and it can pose problems for them later on. Failure to keep up with plugin updates can jeopardize a website’s performance. Updates also lower the possibility of your site getting hacked, which should always be a top priority.

5. Routinely Updating Your Website’s Software

Like plugins, WordPress software also needs to be routinely updated for your website. Software updates contain new features and interfaces that add to the viewer’s positive experience while on your website. That’s reason enough to stay on top of software updates. There is another reason as well: over time, older software may cease to function correctly.

At times, multiple things may need to be updated. How do you know what to do and when? Generally, the best course of action is:

Back up all website files
Refresh your website’s theme
Update plugins for WordPress
Do an update of WordPress

Again, this is the kind of thing that must be closely monitored. Failure to do so puts your website at risk.

Maintaining Your Website: Obviously, It’s Not Easy

Creating and maintaining your own behavioral health care website involves a great deal of knowledge, effort, and time. Content alone is a major investment. In general, it’s necessary to upload approximately two thousand words of fresh content each month, and that’s just one aspect. It’s also important to review older pages and blogs and reoptimize them to satisfy Google’s desire to see websites avoid becoming old and stale.

Over time, most behavioral health care centers find that all these responsibilities are simply beyond their ability to do themselves. When this happens, it’s appropriate to delegate these tasks to a reputable, ethical, digital marketing provider that understands the unique nature of behavioral health care. Once freed of such burdens, you can concentrate on patients, which is the way it should be.

Dan Gemp

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Dan Gemp is the president and CEO of Dreamscape Marketing, a full-service digital marketing agency serving the health care industry based in Columbia, Maryland. A graduate of Villanova University’s School of Business, Gemp applies financial modeling to Dreamscape’s business intelligence campaigns to advise clients on a cost-per-action marketing model. He is a nationally recognized speaker on ethical health care marketing and maintains a year-round speaking schedule. Gemp’s unique perspective at the intersection of business, digital marketing, and health care has made him a thought leader and go-to contributor to many health care podcasts, webinars, and publications including Bloomberg and The New York Times.