Website Maintenance: What Does It Include?
In order to keep your website up and running smoothly, it’s important to engage in some form of website maintenance at least once per month. If you ignore this aspect of running your business, you risk downtime and security breaches that can lead to lost customers, traffic, and revenue. This guide on what does website maintenance include will provide an overview of the most common tasks you should be doing, as well as some more advanced options that you may want to consider adding to your checklist at some point in the future.
Backups
Keeping regular backups of your website allows you to recover in case of a hack or a hardware failure. However, if these kinds of issues aren’t at the top of your priorities (or if you’re just starting out), you can usually leave backups until they’re necessary. For example, if your site grows substantially and takes on a lot more traffic, then it might be worth backing up regularly. If you don’t have enough content for search engines to index, there isn’t much point in keeping regular backups.
A more important part of website maintenance is monitoring search engines to make sure your website is being properly indexed. For example, if you change URLs or alter existing content, Google may not update their index appropriately.
Security
Keeping your site secure is of primary importance. It’s best to hire a security expert, but you can make sure everything is up-to-date by checking and testing frequently. Set aside a few hours every month to perform an audit. Test your backups, firewalls, network servers, database servers and client access points. Make sure that all software is up-to-date and that all changes have been properly tested. Check for malware on your website with a free online scanner like Site Lock or Security Site Check. Update any plugins that are out of date or no longer supported, since these could be hard boring bugs or security holes.
Testing your site design, SEO, and mobile responsiveness
Do you know how many people visit your site each month? How many of those people are repeat visitors, and what keywords did they use to get there? Do you know which pages on your site users have trouble reaching, or if certain webpages aren’t loading quickly enough for mobile users to stay engaged in your content? These are all questions that can be answered by website analytics. By using basic HTML tags and Google Analytics, any business owner can see how their site is performing and where problems lie. This knowledge will help you make informed decisions about design changes, SEO improvements, and more.
You can also find out what percentage of your traffic comes from mobile devices—which may surprise you! For example, Business Insider found that nearly half (49%) of its traffic came from smartphones and tablets. As a result, it reworked its homepage to optimize for these devices. If you want better results from your online efforts, look at how well your site performs!
Other tasks you should add to your website-maintenance list
Coding, email hosting, blogging platform. If you’re serious about your website and your business, then you should think about hiring a coder to maintain it for you. While it might seem like an unnecessary cost—especially if you’re not making much money off of your site right now—doing it yourself can be extremely costly in terms of time and energy. In other words, your time is valuable, and so is yours energy; hiring a professional can take both away from your core business goals. For example, I spent months trying to fix my WordPress template when I could have been writing articles or promoting my brand on social media. Don’t make that mistake! Hire someone else to do it.
