When you buy a car or house, you are faced with the never-ending tasks of preventative maintenance. From painting the trim of the house to rotating the tires and changing the oil, all of these are necessary tasks to preserve the life of these assets. However, I find that many do not really appreciate the advantages of a strong preventative maintenance program for their website or business.
When I was a teenager, before strict safety and labor laws, I would work with my father for the summer at a semi-truck repair facility with him. One day, as we ate lunch, the head of sales and the new operations manager stopped by to talk to my father. The sales guy told my father that he needed to cut maintenance costs by 50% so we could discount our prices to keep clients happy and win new ones.
My father thought we were losing clients because we were not meeting our delivery schedules due to mechanical breakdowns and accidents. The sales manager said that people would accept slower deliveries with lower prices.
My father suggested that instead of lowering prices to keep clients, we could fix the root cause of not meeting our delivery schedules – mechanical breakdowns and accidents. The sales manager said that people would accept slower deliveries if the prices were lower. My father replied, I am not a business person, but if we could meet or exceed our deadlines, could we keep our prices, or maybe increase them?
Discounting or ignoring the root problem does not make it go away. Cutting the maintenance in half will only worsen the situation, especially since he was already down several mechanics. The operations manager chimed in, stating that the maintenance costs compared to those of his previous company, a large grocery store chain, were twice as high and should be reduced. My father responded, stating that the trucks travel farther and carry much heavier loads, which increases their wear more than grocery delivery. He suggested hiring another mechanic who could focus on preventative maintenance, and there would be multiple positive outcomes.
- Keep trucks running with less downtime, keeping delivery schedules
- Reduce roadside service calls that take trucks out of service, require overtime, and increase costs
The Ops Manager wanted to know what proof there was that focusing on preventative maintenance would work this magic. My father pointed to a large windshield with numbers I had written a few days before. He told them I was some numbers savant and had seen patterns in the service logs. He called me over and told me to explain what I found. In a nutshell, the lack of preventative maintenance resulted in more extensive breakdowns and accidents.
Each mechanic’s service call log listed the vehicle, the start and stop of the service, distance traveled, the repair done, and the mechanic’s comments (suggestions as to why it failed). Flipping through the pages, a few patterns emerged. Being curious, I totaled the time for service calls each week by the issue/repair type and cross-tabbed by the reason noted in the mechanics notes. In a separate notebook, I added the vehicle, its load type, distance, and any accidents. From what I remember, these are estimates and the leading root cause.
Tires – 100+ hours per week
- Tread separation
- Sidewall tear
- Flat tires
Brakes – 100+ hours per week (this is the #1 reason for truck accidents)
- Low or no fluid
- Worn pads/disks
- Leaks in lines
Steering Failure – 50+ hours per week
- Low/no fluid
- Worn Ball joints
Lighting Failure – 2 to 4 hours per week
- Burned/malfunctioning lights
- Dirty lights
Essentially, the daytime mechanics spent most of their time driving around the state to fix trucks with issues that could have been prevented. My father was correct; I also found a correlation between the frequency of breakdown and each vehicle’s mileage and load weight. These heavier loads indicated a faster wear rate requiring second-level repairs before the parts wear out, like tires, clutches, and brake hydraulics.
My father suggested that as each truck returned to the depot, the dedicated mechanic would check the state of the tires, fluids, brake system, and lights so that they could be filled or replaced before the truck left in the morning.
Prevention Benefits
- Reduces breakdowns by removing the contributors to failure
- Service call trip time savings could be spent on more extensive backlogged repairs
- It will free up mechanics to do engine and transmission builds, saving money by not outsourcing this work.
- Minimized traffic accidents and legal liability.
I was amazed at how each of these guys interpreted this information. The sales guy’s first question was, won’t this increase our parts cost by repairing things before they break? How can you guarantee they won’t still break down?
The operations guy asked who would maintain this data, and no dedicated mechanic did this work. It seems like a lot of work, and it just shows how poorly my father was managing the maintenance of the vehicles. Neither believed it would work and refused to take it to management.
My father showed me how to do all of these checks, which was my job next month. We tallied the numbers at the end of the month, and the service call rate dropped by 50%, with brake and steering failure calls dropping by 95%. Tire failures only fell by 10% due to the tire guy being laid off. These decreases were due to ensuring they were in working order and that the fluids and flagging items were near failure.
My father gave this data to the Ops Manager. A few days later, there was a company meeting where the President complimented the Ops Manager for his great work reducing service calls. Later that day, my father and another mechanic were laid off due to the decreased service calls.
The following week, my father was hired by their biggest competitor, tasked with implementing a preventative maintenance program to make them the most reliable trucking company in the state.
Tips for implementing preventative maintenance on your website.
As part of a Web Effectiveness program, emphasizing the importance of preventive maintenance is crucial.
- Asset Inventory: Create a comprehensive list of all elements that require maintenance. Similar to the trucking company example, what requires fluids, where are the wear, and where are the critical connection points? Please make a list of these and develop a protocol for checking them. Some common elements for the website are:
- Contact & Checkout Forms and Numbers – Ensure these elements are working. Simply send a test email from the form or your checkout process. Call the number listed and ensure it connects or has a proper recording.
- Search Console Errors – Review errors that Google and Bing identify to ensure they have easy movement on the site.
- Critical Pages Indexed – Are the designated pages for your AlwaysOn keywords indexed? Is traffic still being generated?
- Critical Pages Snippets – Is your snippet engaging or gibberish after being extracted from the page?
- Main Navigation Working – is the navigation clickable and working on desktop and especially mobile
- Prioritization: Determine which assets are critical to operations and would cause significant disruptions if they failed. Prioritizing these assets ensures that maintenance efforts focus on preventing the most impactful failures.
- Maintenance Scheduling: Develop a maintenance schedule based on update cycles, usage patterns, and risk of breakage factors. This schedule should detail each asset’s frequency and type of maintenance tasks. ?For Hreflang Builder, we had an automated test to check the date stamp for the client’s Hreflang XML to ensure that it was autoloading. We did this after we realized their developer broke the autoload script. We were sending them, but their system has not uploaded them for six months.
- Training and Implementation: Ensure that web teams and diagnostic staff are adequately trained on the procedures and understand the importance of adhering to the schedule. Proper training ensures consistency and effectiveness in these routine maintenance activities. ?
2. Benefits of Website Preventive Maintenance: Preventive maintenance focuses on extending the life of mechanical equipment, but what about our web environment?
- Cost Savings: Regular preventative maintenance can reduce the likelihood of expensive emergency code fixes during a peak sales season, resulting in unplanned downtime. Identifying the source of 404 or redirect errors in the content workflow allows you to fix the source quickly, saving agency or dev resources later.
- Customer Satisfaction: If the shopping and conversion experience is flawless or problems with abandonment are identified early, they can be improved or fixed, minimizing downtime or customer dissatisfaction. For example, I was completing a form that required the phone number to be entered in a specific way. There was no example, and I tried multiple formats, ultimately giving up. I emailed them telling them I was trying to check out, and what the format for the phone number is. They responded snarkily that it is a “normal phone number.” Replying with a screen capture, they realized someone had coded it incorrectly, and further discovery found nearly a 98 percent abandonment rate on the form. Fortunately, it was only a few days.
- Enhanced Security: Monitoring access logs and software updates, especially with WordPress sites, to keep them current and close known vulnerabilities, prevents malware injections, brute-force attacks, and data breaches.
3. Common Challenges and Solutions: There are a host of potential obstacles that can minimize successful implementation:?
- Resource Allocation: Allocating sufficient resources, including time and personnel, can be challenging just as with the trucking company example. To justify the investment, emphasize the long-term benefits and potential cost savings.?
- Scheduling Conflicts: While most web effectiveness checks can be done without disrupting normal operations, diagnostic crawling may use bandwidth that teams want to allocate to customers. Coordinate activities with potential conflict and even do so during off-peak hours.?
- Not Sexy or Fun: Everyone hates diagnostic work because it is not a sexy hack or particularly enjoyable chasing the source of broken pages. But just like putting oil in your car it needs to be done. You need to mandate its action and at the same time elevate its importance. If it not appreciated as a mission-critical task people will never see it that way.