In its simplest form, website maintenance is checking and making sure that your website is in good working condition. This includes new content, updating existing content, running updates, and ensuring traffic to your website.
There are great benefits to website maintenance, whether you are a small or large company.
Remember, a website can never be free. Because a lot of work goes into its creation, and its permanence online. No matter how simple a website looks, it is very complicated in the front, as well as at the back end.
How do you proceed with Website Maintenance?
Website maintenance is not a simple task. There are a lot of tasks to be done and on a fairly regular basis too. The best way to go about it is to separate what you need to do for your Website Maintenance into frequency–
Frequency: Weekly or even Twice Weekly
1. Check your page speed. In today’s world, the speed of loading of your website is crucial. Just a few seconds can scare potential customers away.
2. Check if pages are loading. Sure your page is fast, but is everything loading, right? Does the right page show up when the link is clicked? Do any error messages show?
3. Create incremental back-ups. Every hosting service offers a way to back up a page. Take advantage of this to help in your darkest days.
4. Update, update, update. Heard of Log4j? That’s a 0-day attack that can only be solved with updates. Not only do you update your site, update your scripts, your plugins, check your database too.
5. Make updates to website software and plugins.
6. Remove any spam comments on your site, or your blogs, check everywhere.
7. New Content. You have a community to feed. Always have new content.
Frequency: Monthly
1. Analyze your stats, if you can, there are tools that can help you do this. Find how you are doing organically. Are you getting searched online as many times as you have expected?
2. Run some security checks, is your security scan up to date, and has any hacking attempt been detected?
3. Update your blog contents. If your blog is getting seen, update your other blogs that aren’t. Search Engines love updated content. They see this as an active site and updating content on your blogs can move you higher on search results.
4. Look for the community. Check your community if they have comments and suggestions that you can reflect upon and may be, even use in the future
Frequency: Quarterly
1. Check your website’s design. Is your website looking old? Does it need a facelift to look current?
2. Review your multimedia contents and style. It’s a visual war out there on the internet, if your page gets stagnant and not be part of the times, no one is going to look at it.
3. Analyze your SEO. Are you getting enough traffic? Are you getting searched? Are your articles and blogs being read? Is your website ranking or tanking?
4. Assess your scripts, your forms, pop-ups, ads, links, and even sign-ups.
5. Try your site on devices. See if the website can load on different browsers for Windows, Mac, Ubuntu. Test if your website looks great on smartphones and tablets.
6. Scrutinize your marketing campaigns. Is your website getting enough traffic that you can rely on organic campaigns more than paying for ads? Is the strategy you employed in your first few months still making a difference or is it time to change?
Frequency: Yearly
1. Make sure that you remove dated contents. Do not pin contents that are referring to the former year.
2. Check the accuracy of your page’s contents. Use tools to sniff out grammar and spelling issues, unnecessary bullets, numbers, even symbols, and emojis. Remove inappropriate content based on your target customers.
3. Don’t forget your back-end. Make sure you are all paid-up with your domain services, see if you need to make payments especially for your domain name since a domain name can be bought by anyone at any time (it even happened to Google!). If you need more hosting space, asses that as well.
Website maintenance is a cycle. The frequency of tasks can and will overlap. Vigilance is the key and you need to be there constantly. Tasks of different frequencies may need to be done at other intervals. Is this something you can do? Do you think it would be best to leave it to a pro? Here’s a hint–
That’s the first part of our 2 part blog about Website Maintenance. In the next blog, we’ll discuss a lot more about the benefits, and why website maintenance is important. See you soon!
