Website Maintenance
Keep your website up-to-date
What Is Website Maintenance?
Website maintenance is the act of regularly checking your website for issues and mistakes and keeping it updated and relevant. This should be done on a consistent basis in order to keep your website healthy, encourage continued traffic growth, and strengthen your SEO and Google rankings.
Keeping a website well maintained and attractive is important to companies big and small in order to engage and retain customers. It’s easy for businesses, especially startups, to cut corners and let a few tasks slide.
Weekly Task List
Check that all of your pages are loading without errors
Run a backup and make sure a previous version of your site is stored
Make updates to website software and plugins
Check that all of your forms are running properly
Remove any spam comments from pages and posts
Check your pages to see if there are any broken links
Search for 404 errors and fix or redirect
Write one or more blog posts to keep your community engaged and encourage SEO traffic.
Monthly Task List
Check the load speed of your website and ensure that nothing is bogging it down
Review your security scans and make sure nothing is out of place
Analyze website statistics from the previous month
Check your blog to see if there are any articles that could be updated
A Proper Website Maintenance Plan Is a Circle
As you can see from our checklist, website maintenance should be a consistent part of your business. It grows on itself, and if not correctly implemented, can cause some serious problems and setbacks to your potential growth and business health.
Staying on top of website health takes awareness and organization. This is particularly the case for a large site with hundreds (or even thousands) of pages.
With the introduction of new tools to make website building easier, website sizes are growing each year. While it’s easy to add pages to most websites, it’s not as easy to keep all of your pages in a good state.
Why Is It Important to Do Website Maintenance?
Many new businesses already have a lot on their plates without worrying about constantly checking in on their website. It’s tempting to buy a domain name, throw up something temporary, and just worry about it later. There are many reasons why this is not a good idea. Maintaining a current, healthy, and active website is important for a number of reasons.
SEO
Google wants to rank websites that have the most relevant and up-to-date information on their search engine results page . They may even de-index your website entirely if it hasn’t been updated recently enough and if they suspect it has been infected by malware. You must keep your website regularly updated with current content, news, keywords, and articles in order to rank well in search results.
Regularly website maintenance is invaluable for SEO strategy.
Customer Attraction/Engagement
If your website is gaining traction and traffic, it’s important to keep those potential customers. If they aren’t able to find what they are looking for, current information and relevant content, there is a good chance you’ll lose interest quickly. In order for your website to be the useful tool you want, you’ll need to ensure it is free from typos and grammar issues, has any and all information a customer could want, and looks engaging and consistent.
Security
This is the single most important reason to keep website maintenance on your radar, particularly if your website is storing any form of customer information. If you are using a website building platform like WordPress or Wix, you must ensure that you are installing regular software updates and security patches. It can be easy and attractive for hackers to find and target websites that have sat dormant for too long.