Website Maintenance Guide

Website maintenance is an important part of keeping your website healthy. You wouldn’t buy a car and never change the oil, so don’t invest in a website and never maintain it! An unmaintained website is vulnerable to hackers and can even make you lose potential customers. 

In this article I’m going to give you the lowdown on what you need to know to properly maintain your website. 

What is Website Maintenance? 

Website Maintenance is the process of checking your website for broken links, security vulnerabilities, keeping software up to date and similar tasks that ensure your website is performing properly. Some of these tasks such as, renewing your domain name, only need to be performed once a year, other tasks such as, checking and fixing 404 errors should be done weekly. 

All website maintenance tasks are crucial to keeping your website running smoothly. That’s why you should be performing regular checkups. 

Why is Website Maintenance Important?

You’re probably thinking, why can’t I just launch a website and let it be? Do I really need to deal with all this maintenance stuff? Well, to put it simply you can, you can choose not to maintain your website if you want, but it is going to cost you customers, SEO ranking, your professional reputation, security, and eventually money. 

Customer Experience

Think of a time you visited a website that was completely outdated (like built in the early 2000’s), slow to load and had loads of broken links. You probably clicked the back button pretty fast didn’t you? Or you got super frustrated when you couldn’t find the information you were looking for. Well, that is why website maintenance is important for your customers experience. 

Every click away from your website is a lost customer. If they can’t find what they are looking for, they’ll go somewhere else. To keep your customers engaged in your website you need to ensure that you have relevant, up to date, working content for them to engage with.

SEO

Search engine robots are much like customers, they want relevant, up to date, working content so they know what to show on the search engine results page. Poor search rankings mean your website will be hard to find and won’t do its job of bringing you new customers. 

Professional Reputation

Trust is the foundation on which a potential customer is going to use your business or not. An outdated, poorly maintained website is going to make the customer think your business can’t be trusted and they will most likely take their business somewhere else. 

To establish trust with potential customers it’s important to keep your website content current, fix broken links, redirect old pages, and have a professional looking website design. 

Security

Every business owners worst nightmare, getting hacked. A hacker could be the downfall of your business, especially if you are storing customer’s personal information on your website. Regular website maintenance will find and fix security vulnerabilities to keep your website secure from an attack. 

Money

An unmaintained website is a money pit. It doesn’t matter how good your website was to begin with, or how much you paid for it. If you aren’t going to maintain your website, it will eventually break to the point of no return. Then you’ll have to start all over again. Your website is an investment, take proper care if it and it will help bring your business success. 

What are Website Maintenance Tasks and How Often Should They Be Performed? 

Let’s get into the good stuff! How do you actually maintain your website? How often does each task need to be performed? 

Weekly Tasks

• Check and fix any 404 errors. 
• Check that all of the pages are error free. 
• Update plugins, themes and website software.
• Remove spam comments. 
• Check for broken links. 
• Write at least one blog post to keep customers/clients engaged and increase SEO rankings. 

Monthly Tasks

• Check the load speed, if your website is loading slow fix whatever is slowing it down. 
• Run security scans.
• Review analytics to ensure your website is performing as expected.
• Check your search ranking, make improvements if needed. 

Quarterly Tasks

• Update graphics and photos (if needed).
• Check for areas of your website that could be improved. 
• Update your website content (if needed).
• Review and update your SEO if it’s not performing as expected. 
• Perform mobile testing and browser testing. 
• Test that all forms and popups are working.
• Restore to the most recent backup to check the health of your backups.

Yearly Tasks

• Renew your website domain name.
• Renew your hosting plan. 
• Check each page for spelling, grammar and accuracy. 
• Check your best-performing blogs, is there new content you can add to them?
• Consider updating your website design. 

Next Steps

This can seem like an overwhelming amount of information and you may be wondering if this is a task you have to take on yourself. 

Option 1: You can take on the website maintenance tasks yourself, but be prepared to spend a good amount of time each month performing the tasks. 

Option 2: You can hire a professional to maintain your website for you. This is the less stress inducing option. 

Whichever option you choose, I wish you a happy, healthy website that brings your business all the success.