When you buy a car or house, you are faced with the never-ending tasks of preventative maintenance. From painting the house trim to rotating the tires and changing the oil, all of these tasks are necessary to preserve the life of these assets. However, I find that many people do not truly appreciate the benefits of a robust preventive maintenance program for their website or business.
When I was a teenager, before strict safety and labor laws were in place, I would work with my father at a semi-truck repair facility during the summer. One day, as we ate lunch, the head of sales and the new operations manager stopped by to talk to my father. The sales manager informed my father that he needed to reduce maintenance costs by 50% so that we could offer discounted prices to retain existing clients and attract new ones.
My father stated we were losing clients because we were not meeting our delivery schedules, which were being delayed due to mechanical breakdowns and accidents. The sales manager believed customers would accept slower deliveries in exchange for lower prices. 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 and zero time is spent on preventative maintenance. 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 this company’s trucks travel farther and carry much heavier loads, which increases their wear more than those used for grocery delivery. He suggested hiring another mechanic who could focus on preventive maintenance, and this would result in 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 brief, the lack of preventive maintenance led to more extensive breakdowns and accidents.
Each mechanic’s service call log listed the vehicle, the start and end of the service, the distance traveled, the repair performed, and the mechanic’s comments (including suggestions as to why the issue occurred). Flipping through the pages, a few patterns emerged. Being curious, I totaled the time spent on service calls each week by issue or repair type and cross-tabulated by the reason noted in the mechanic’s notes. In a separate notebook, I recorded the vehicle’s details, including 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 wore out, such as tires, clutches, and brake hydraulics.
My father suggested that as each truck returned to the depot, the dedicated mechanic would inspect the state of the tires, fluids, brake system, and lights so that fluids could be topped off or excessively worn parts could be replaced before the truck departed 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 manager asked who would maintain this data, and no dedicated mechanic was assigned to do this work. It seems like a lot of work, and it highlights how poorly my father was managing the vehicle maintenance. 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 the 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 decreased by only 10% due to the tire technician 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 Operations Manager for his excellent work in reducing service calls. Later that day, my father and another mechanic were laid off due to a decrease in service calls.
The following week, my father was hired by their biggest competitor, given a pay raise, and 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 and Checkout Forms and Numbers – Ensure these elements are functioning correctly. Send a test email from the form or your checkout process. Call the listed number and ensure it connects or plays 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: Identify the assets that are critical to operations and would cause significant disruptions if they were to fail. 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 factors associated with breakage. This schedule should detail the frequency and type of maintenance tasks for each asset. For Hreflang Builder, we had an automated test to verify the date stamp on the client’s Hreflang XML and ensure that it was auto-loading. We did this after we realized that their developer had broken 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 preventive maintenance can reduce the likelihood of expensive emergency code fixes during peak sales seasons, resulting in unplanned downtime. Identifying the source of 404 or redirect errors in the content workflow enables you to resolve the issue quickly, saving agency or development resources in the long run.
- 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 inquiring about the format for the phone number. They responded snarkily that it is a “normal phone number.” Replying with a screen capture, they realized someone had coded it incorrectly, and further investigation found a nearly 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, preventing malware injections, brute-force attacks, and data breaches.
3. Common Challenges and Solutions: A host of potential obstacles can hinder successful implementation.
- Resource Allocation: Allocating sufficient resources, including time and personnel, can be challenging, as seen in 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 the 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’s not a sexy hack or particularly enjoyable, especially when 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 is not appreciated as a mission-critical task, people will never see it that way.
