Website Maintenance
Nowadays, if your business is not present online, then it does not exist. The truth of this statement cannot be overemphasized. Your website is the backbone of your business’s online presence. Customers and potential buyers visit your website to learn more about your company, search your contact information and finally, buy your products.
A good website design gives a strong impression on your customers and if you want to keep your audience or attract more customers, you must keep your website in its best condition to attract them to stay over your site. No matter how perfect your website is, there is always room for improvement depending on the advancement in technology, market demands, and new competitors, thus a call for website maintenance.
Additionally, if your website is not working properly, you may lose out on ideal opportunities including new leads and sales. Regular website maintenance eliminates or rather prevents these issues. This article is dedicated to helping you understand more about website maintenance.
What is Website Maintenance?
Website maintenance is the regular task of checking in on your site and ensuring that everything is running smoothly. Giving your website a turn-up regularly prevents the risks of downtime, prevents broken links from stacking up, maintains your site speed, and other more benefits.
Additionally, website maintenance ensures customers and leads visiting your site are met with a fast, comfortable, and instinctive user experience which motivates them to sign up, buy and visit your site again in the future.
How to Maintain your Website: Skills and Tools Needed.
For proper website maintenance, you ought to have the right tools and be well equipped with the ideal skills to do so.
Website maintenance skills
Below are some of the skills necessary to be on level or even, on top of your website maintenance plan:
- An understanding of the website and online attacks and how to prevent them.
- An eye for design.
- An update on the latest SEO best practices.
Website Maintenance Tools
For proper website maintenance, you must have the appropriate tools and knowledge on how to use them. Below are some of the best tools:
- Website analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Moz Pro, Ahrefs, and more.
Website Content management systems such as Wix, WordPress, and Squarespace.
Image resizing tool.
- Your website cPanel which is offered by your web hosting provider.
Steps For Website Maintenance
Your website needs the coordination of different elements for it to run effectively. These include plugin updates, navigation, content, backlinks, visual design sales funnels, branding, loading speed, security updates, and more. Considering all these elements, and the quality of your website design, your web maintenance requires a lengthy checklist of to-dos.
This seems overwhelming, but you should not be worried since these tasks can be divided depending on how often you require them making the least of website maintenance more manageable. Below is a checklist to help you maintain your website to the best standards and keep it running smoothly:
Weekly Website Maintenance Work
- Use a page-loading tool to ensure that your website pages are loading fast and without any errors. These tools include GT Metrix, Google Search Engine Console, and Webpagetest.
- Check the website dashboard for updates or error alerts every week. Approve all the software updates and plugins. Failure to do so can result in security risks mostly if your website is configured with WordPress.
- Back up your site and ensure the backup is stored in a secure location. This activity can be automated if you are using a plugin such as UpdraftPlus.
Check your site navigation for any broken links.
- Publish at least a blog post per week on your site. Keeping an updated blog helps your website rank higher for keywords and even grow your organic traffic.
Monthly Web Maintenance Job
Review the loading speed of your whole website preferably with GT Metrix. If there are issues with the loading speed, the tool will generate the issues and you can learn how to repair this and improve your site.
Analyze the statistics of your business performance from the previous month and find out any optimization opportunities available.
- Review the security scans shown by your security app and if there are suspicious activities within your site, contact a web security professional.
Quarterly Website Maintenance tasks
Test your website’s responsive behavior to ensure it is perfect and works well on devices.
Read over your website’s popups, forms, and CTAs for improvement.
- Review your website design and look for optimization opportunities.
Conduct a website audit and make sure your site’s SEO is updated.
Yearly Site Maintenance Tasks
Verify that your website domain name has been renewed and your card info for your paid plugins is up-to-date.
- Look for blogs that are not ranking and run them through SEO tools to bring them to the current best practices.
- Update all your previous year references to the current year.
- Update blogs that are not driving traffic to ensure their performance is improved.
Importance of Website Maintenance
Consistent website maintenance provides more than an attractive website but also generates leads and sales and your customers feel secure on your site. Below are the benefits of website maintenance.
It helps improve security
Website security is one of the core reasons why website maintenance is important. For instance, while using a WordPress CMS, you will ensure that the website has the latest security and software patches, thereby improving security from hackers, and security in general.
It helps improve site traffic
Another benefit is improving website traffic, which on the other side helps in increasing sales. Generally, websites are ranked based on regular updating. This means that website maintenance helps increase sales and traffic.
Conclusion
Website maintenance is indeed a key factor in your website’s success. The above article has provided you with detailed information, from what is website maintenance to its importance. Ensure that your website is well maintained and updated to get lasting fruits.
