There’s no right or wrong answer as to whether maintaining your own drug rehab website is a good idea. Of course, it’s natural to want to host your website yourself since it’s your website and you feel you can control it better.

 

In fact, building and/or maintaining your own drug rehab website seems a logical way to save money. After all, it’s your website design and you’re not paying outside experts to do it. This may look very good in any company’s budget, especially if those budgets are tight. For a younger company, maintaining your own website yourself is indeed very tempting.

 

Saving a few dollars, however, may not be as easy as it seems. Building out your own drug rehab website requires time… a lot of it. That could mean time taken away from other things that require your attention. Few detox centers or drug rehab facilities have the luxury of devoting large amounts of time to designing a professional website themselves. For that reason, relying on the expertise of an outside source can often be the best solution.

 

It’s time to take a hard look at what it really takes to maintain a website. As it turns out, the number of companies maintaining their own websites isn’t very high. A recent technology survey indicates that a mere 27% of small businesses maintain their website. Furthermore, just 40% handle technical support issues on their own.

 

5 Things To Accomplish With Your Drug Rehab Website

Before you decide what’s best for your drug rehab center’s website, it’s necessary to consider five things you must do with it:

Keep Your Site Backed-Up

If you use the highly popular content management system WordPress—and the odds are that you do—there are several reliable plugins that make backing up your website a relatively simple task. You’ll have to set a backup schedule and the plugin will do the necessary work. Not backing up your site can be a costly error. If the unthinkable happens and your drug rehab website crashes, you don’t want to start back at square one.

Upload New Content Regularly

Maintaining your own drug rehab website means adding new content to your website on a regular basis, usually through the use of blogs. Search engines like Google want to see new content showing up on your site on a regular basis because that’s how decides whether you provide something of value to people searching. In fact, Google’s robots crawl the web every minute of the day seeking out new, original marketing content. If your website is stale and even slightly out of date, be prepared to Google to begin reducing the ranking of your website.

Update Your Plugins

If you’re maintaining your own drug rehab website, you’ve probably gravitated to a content management system like WordPress for the easy availability of plugins. For the uninitiated, plugins are tiny programs that add functions to your WordPress site. Literally, hundreds of plugins are available, depending on what you need. The good thing is that they’re free.

One thing to keep in mind is that these plugins have to be regularly updated. When you log into WordPress, you’ll receive notices on your dashboard if you need any updates to plugins. You’ll need to really stay on top of these updates. They not only improve performance but also remove bugs that can increase the possibility of your website getting hacked.

Refresh the theme of your website

You’ve created your drug rehab website. Now what? Upload it and sit back? Any website theme has a limited shelf life. Maintaining your own drug rehab website requires much more than that. Be prepared to update the theme of your website every year or two. Styles change—sometimes faster than you think. You need to stay in the loop about how web design is evolving at any given moment.  

 

Website software always needs to be updated

As with any software, your website software will need to be updated on a regular basis. These updates shouldn’t be ignored. WordPress software updates add new features and interfaces which can enhance a viewer’s experience on your website. Something else to keep in mind: older versions of software may not operate correctly over time. With a reputable agency for website hosting, you can feel confident your website is up to date.

Sometimes, you’ll get multiple messages about things that need to be updated. In what order should you do the updates? First, do a full backup that includes all of your website’s files. Then, update the following:

• Plugins (Do this before updating WordPress itself)
• The theme
• WordPress itself

 

Is Maintaining Your Website the Right Choice For You?

Maintaining your own drug rehab website can be a great deal of work. For example, you should create 2,000 words of completely original content in blogs or landing pages each month. This is, of course, on top of all of the maintenance required on a website, such as refreshing the drug rehab marketing content of old pages and blogs, devising new keyword strategies for future content and keeping up with Google’s ever-changing requirements for websites.

 

For some addiction treatment facilities, these duties can become very difficult to handle over time. It’s no surprise that most drug rehabs will ultimately decide to over these duties to outside experts.

Is Maintaining Your Own Drug Rehab Website Too Difficult?

Dreamscape Marketing can offer you an affordable way to outsource website maintenance duties to our expert webmasters. Call us at 888.307.7304 or email us for more information.