Websites have become an essential asset for every business nowadays. But in order for your website to serve its purpose it needs maintenance. Website maintenance is essential for keeping a website up-to-date, secure, fast and reliable.
There are a lot of things that need to be taken care of while maintaining a website. And here, we’re going to share useful tips for website maintenance that can help you to make the most out of the maintenance process. Note that this article is not about how to maintain your website but rather about tips that can make the website maintenance process easier and more productive.
Create a Website Maintenance Schedule
Website maintenance is a continuous process, and you need to regularly monitor your website to notice all the bugs, errors and other issues on time. Besides, websites need regular updates so as to ensure there are no compatibility issues between plugins, the website and the browser.
To set the right frequency of monitoring, you need to assess your website and your industry. For example, if there is a lot of traffic coming to your website and changes are made there on a daily basis, then you need frequent monitoring twice a week or even every day. This is crucial, especially when you have an e-commerce website, as it’s your primary source of income and contains a lot of sensitive data and customer information. So it’s your responsibility to ensure data security.
For websites with less traffic, weekly or monthly monitoring can be enough. However, some maintenance features need to be monitored and updated more frequently, e.g. content updates. So, set a schedule on your calendar to ensure you don’t miss any maintenance items.
In case you’re still not sure how frequently you should monitor, once a month can be enough to ensure the good functioning of a website. And if you don’t know what to include in your maintenance plan, here you can find all the essential information.
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Include SEO Audit in Your Maintenance Plan
When talking about website maintenance, people usually think about website security, codes and programming. True, SEO is more related to marketing, but it’s also essential for the healthy performance of the website.
If you have an in-house SEO team or work with a freelancer/agency, you don’t need to worry about this; the specialists will take care of the SEO monitoring. But still, you need to coordinate with them the monitoring schedule and be aware of some analytics as well. You can use Google Analytics, SEMrush, Ahrefs or other SEO tools you like to view the analytics.
SEO is an essential factor in having a successful website that receives your desired amount of traffic. So, don’t overlook SEO.
Don't Forget About Content Updates
Content updates are no less important in keeping the website fresh and updated. This is one of the most underestimated tips for website maintenance on this list.
Content updates are good for SEO, as Google prioritizes websites that are regularly updated.
Besides, it’s crucial for users as well. They value new, fresh, relevant content, and regularly updating your content can make your website one of the favourites of your target audience. Therefore, try to add content that can help your visitors relieve their pain points and find valuable information. This way, you will appear as a trustworthy, reliable source of information and can increase the number of returning visitors.
New blog posts, videos or other content – you decide which one to choose. Don’t forget to make your content SEO-optimized to increase your chances of ranking higher and attracting more visitors.
Pay Attention to Feedback
Regardless it’s for your website, app, products or your brand, customer feedback can give valuable information that you can use to improve your business processes and products and have more satisfied customers.
What refers to the websites, you can add a comment section and forms or implement other ways of feedback collection to know what your customers and visitors think about your website. Maybe there are some features that your website doesn’t need anymore. Or perhaps you need to add some new ones? Also, visitors can use the forms to inform you when something is not working, so you’ll be able to fix it very fast without affecting other customers’ journeys on your website.
Set Goals for Your Website
Until now, we have been talking about more technical things to improve the website’s performance. But there’s another important thing besides that. And it’s about setting goals.
You’ve created your website for a purpose, whether it’s to sell products, describe your services or as a channel of communication with your clients. Regardless of the purpose, it’s essential to set a clear goal for your website so that you know which parts of your website need more attention.
If you need to increase the traffic to your website, you need to improve the SEO and web design. If you need to get more leads, you need to work more on improving your content and marketing in general.
So, set clear goals for your website to understand which parts of your website need improvement. Don’t ignore this point, as it’s one of the most critical tips for website maintenance.
And finally, don’t forget to measure the results and regularly monitor your website to notice whether you’re heading in the right direction and need to make changes to your website.
Opt for Secure Hosting Services
Hosting is a crucial factor for good website performance. It can affect page speed, website security, website performance in all parts of the world and many other important metrics. Plus, it can affect the number of crashes that happen to your website.
So, it’s essential to choose the right hosting for your website so you won’t face a performance drop. Even if your website has a great design and content, but users can’t access it, it will not serve its purpose.
Besides, high-quality, secure hosting services providers also offer CDN (content delivery network) services along with hosting. It creates a cached version of your website that can help to make your website load faster in any part of the world. CDN reduces the distance data needs to travel to deliver your page to the user. This is especially important if your business is working internationally.
Know Your Audience
This is also one of the overlooked tips for website maintenance, as it’s not directly related to maintenance. Though, it can have a significant impact on the website performance.
When you started your business, you probably did audience research to find out who your future customers are. But our world changes fast, as do customers’ preferences. And it can be helpful if you review your audience from time to time to know if anything has changed in their behaviour or preferences.
How does this affect the website? When you research your audience, especially their online behaviour, you will find out what website features they need more, what they like and what they don’t and a lot of other valuable information. And all this information can help you to understand which plugins, features, and themes you need to add or delete and create a more personalized customer experience for your users.
And don’t forget to analyze the mobile version of your website and make sure your website is mobile-friendly.
Don't Forget About Web Design Updates
Besides all the technical and marketing tips, we also need to discuss design. It’s not news that web design affects not only customer satisfaction but also a website’s performance. If the website has too many animations or other heavy design elements, its speed can be too slow.
Besides, poor UX makes the website hard to navigate, and search engines may not rank it high.
And, of course, of all essential things, web design affects the customer experience and whether users are willing to come back to your website or not. So remember that as customers’ preferences and web design trends change, you need to review your website design from time to time to ensure it’s competitive.
Update Copyright, Legal Terms and Conditions
And our last tip is about legal terms and conditions. Most websites publish their legal terms and conditions when launching a website and forget about them. But as you update the website’s content, it’s also recommended to update this page.
Laws and regulations change from time to time, and it’s important that your website’s terms correspond to all state and international laws. Your website’s copyright and privacy policy are some of the points you need to review to ensure your website’s and your customers’ rights are protected.
When you’re doing the annual audit of your website, it makes sense to review your legal disclaimers as well.
Final Words
Maintaining a website is a continuous, time-consuming, yet fundamental process that ensures the healthy performance of a website. And here, we’ve listed some helpful tips for website maintenance so you can make the most out of it.
This article is not about how to maintain a website; it’s more about overlooked parts of website maintenance. They may not be as crucial as plugin updates, but they are definitely helpful for making your website more successful.
If you want to know more about website maintenance and how to perform it, here you can find all the essential information.
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General FAQ
What is website maintenance?
Website maintenance is the process of taking necessary actions to run and manage the website successfully. It includes security and speed checks, software and plugin updates, website content updates, etc.
Why do you need website maintenance?
Website maintenance is important for ensuring the healthy performance of a website. Without proper maintenance, websites can become outdated and vulnerable to viruses and malware.
What's included in the website maintenance?
Website maintenance includes the overall audit of the website, security checks, SEO monitoring, content updates, code updates, speed checks, etc. In this article, we’ve listed essential tips for website maintenance. But if you want a more comprehensive guide to website maintenance, visit this page.
