5 Common Website Maintenance Tasks You Should Be Doing
As a business owner, your job doesn’t end when your website launches. Your website cannot evolve on its own to be solely responsible for attracting traffic forever. Like everything else, it also requires maintenance from time to time for you to achieve your goals.
Website maintenance is a frequent process and you need to keep up with it for your website to perform and provide you the desired results. To help you stay on top of your game, it is essential for you to understand the basics of website maintenance as well as the tasks or activities that need to be performed to manage them properly.
What is Website Maintenance?
You cannot perform maintenance activities unless you completely understand what it is all about. The burning question is: what is website maintenance? It is a process of improving your website for smooth running, ensuring everything including broken links, content, speed, designs, backups, and other factors that contribute to performance, are absolutely perfect.
Website maintenance is more than finding errors in a website, it emphasizes the enhancement of user experience, security against potential cyber threats, and unlocking your website’s full potential to thrive. It is integral for your long-term success and enables you to avoid pitfalls for your business to achieve the desired goals.
Types of Website Maintenance
After the launch of your website, there are different types of website maintenance that you need to be mindful of.
1. Disaster Recovery
It is crucial to have a recent backup of your website just in case of a mishap. With disaster recovery planning, you can retrieve your website including all the important data and your website can run smoothly without any glitches, ensuring smooth operations in case it gets hacked or corrupted.
2. Security Concerns
Trouble comes without calling, right? Hence, the other type of website maintenance is to protect against the disasters that you may encounter and that is with security updates. Now, some web development agencies also provide security patches to cater to the vulnerabilities in the software. You must install them soon to ensure the safety of your website and protect your website against cyber threats and malware.
3. Content Updates
What good is your content if it is not up-to-date? Bad or irrelevant content can significantly drop your website ranking and can make your site look outdated and dull. It results in repelling your potential customers. Therefore, it should be upgraded as a major part of website maintenance service. It may include engaging blog posts, eliminating old-fashioned content, attractive descriptions, and more.
4. SEO Check
Your website’s visibility can be impacted negatively if your website maintenance is not on point. Your website’s SEO is highly important to make sure you get all the search engine rankings and website traffic for your business to be visible to your audience. With frequent SEO monitoring, you can analyze your traffic and track your progress to evaluate success metrics.
5. Performance Optimization
Website performance plays a major role in keeping your site seamlessly functional. It allows you to detect problems in the website, take initiative to rectify them, and enhance the site’s speed and responsiveness. Some of the important aspects to keep in consideration are page load time, image size optimization, minifying codes, and more.
Website Maintenance Tasks You Should Perform
1. Website Performance on Different Browsers
You never know what device or browser your users would opt for to visit your website. Therefore, you must make sure that they have no trouble accessing your website on any device. How? Website maintenance for website optimization can do that for you. Start by reviewing your site on different devices to ensure its smooth operation. Moreover, you need to focus on mobile-friendliness as well. The vast majority uses smartphone for browsing, hence, your site must be mobile-friendly and should fit all screen sizes.
With regular updates of browsers and plugins, you may face problems with functioning across different devices. So, check your website on tablets, smartphones, and laptops with different browsers on every device. You have to be completely sure that no links on your website is broken and everything functions how it is supposed to.
2. Website Speed
Did you know that Yahoo reduced its page loading time and witnessed a traffic hike by 9%?
Yes, this is the impact of your website speed on web traffic and eventually on your website ranking. If you page is taking more 10 or more seconds, your audience is likely going to give up on your site and lose attention. Therefore, you make every effort in your website maintenance services to reduce your page speed as low as possible.
You can use tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights to evaluate the metrics that impact your site speed. You can also use techniques of browser caching, image optimization, Gzip compression.
3. Broken Links
Dead or bad links can harm the credibility of your website. This is the reason, you need to check your links to ensure that they direct users to where they are meant to. Broken links annoy users because no one enjoys a “404 error not found” landing on their page. These links ultimately leak your traffic.
Your website’s internal links must also be intact and perfectly functional. You must use effective tools such as Screaming Frog to identify the broke links after which you can remove or update them.
4. Check CTA’s
Your CTA (Call to Action) is supposed to encourage users to take the action i.e. mostly to make a purchase. As important as CTA’s are, their performance is equally important. You must test your CTA’s every month and make sure they enable you to grow your subscribers, enhance conversion, encourage site visitors to shop from you. Moreover, if you have an ecommerce business, your CTA’s should persuade your visitors to add items to the cart and make the purchase, and in such cases you can use CTA’s like “Buy Now” or “Check Out” button.
5. Website Analytics
Your website maintenance greatly reflects on your analytics which is the tool to measure the success of your website. There are many robust tools to fulfill this purpose including Google Analytics which provides you in-depth analysis of the bounce rate, conversion rates, conversions, demographics, page views, page visits per day, and more. You can analyze your audience’s behavior to understand their emotions and use this to your advantage by polishing your strategy and enhancing your user engagement. The updated content will help you improve the quality and quantity of your website.
How Frequent Do I Need Website Maintenance?
The frequency of your website maintenance depends on many factors including the size and the scope of your website. As a general idea, your website should be updated on a monthly basis, or more frequently if it’s possible.
Website maintenance is super important for your site to function accurately. It enables your site to look fresh, updated, and perform well. By ensuring every maintenance task is performed correctly, you can guarantee the efficiency and longevity of the site. These maintenance activities act as an investment that is immensely rewarding in the future.
A dynamic website maintenance service provider can elevate the standards of your business. Digital Gravity is one such provider which takes the stress away of website maintenance from its clients and delivers exceptional results which reflect in site visibility and overall business growth.
