Website Maintenance is the process of ensuring that your website is up to date, displaying properly and delivering on all key expected outcomes, for you and your business.
Yes, it is an important aspect of web design that’s been largely ignored by a lot of businesses especially small businesses.
Of course that’s not supposed to be so yet for so many businesses, going digital is all about building a website and getting your business online. And for this reason, they do not really bother about what happens after the website is built.
Truth be told, too many business owners do not even know that inadequate website maintenance can ruin their business and destroy so many years of hard work.
And that their website must be periodically updated and maintained if they really want to maximize the benefits of going online but in this piece, I am going to take you through some of the important reasons why you need to invest in website maintenance after building your website.
And after that, we will dig into your website maintenance check list and what you can do to maintain and manage your website all by yourself. Let’s dig in…
Top 4 Reasons why Website Maintenance is Important
- Ensures Availability of Website. The number one reason why website maintenance is important is that it ensures that your website is live and available for website visitors, whenever they want to access it.
- Keeps your website safe from vulnerabilities. One important reason why website maintenance is important is that it ensures your website is up to date and safe from hackers and other online vulnerabilities that could arise from an updated plugin or software used on the website.
- Ensures consistent Display. Website maintenance ensures your website is displaying exactly the way it ought to display and your audiences are able to achieve the results they want while using your website.
- Enables you to measure and analyze your result. Website maintenance enables you to measure and analyze results obtained from your digital marketing effort. Based on your achieved results, you can always decide on the right line of action to take as regards marketing and achievement of even better results.
As you can see, there are so many reasons why website management and maintenance is very important despite the fact that so many people are not even aware of the benefits.
Website Maintenance Checklist for Beginners
The good thing is that you don’t necessarily need anyone to manage and maintain your website for you. It’s something you can do on your own, after you learn some important tips on website management.
That said, in the following paragraphs, I’ll be sharing with you the comprehensive website management checklist and all the important things you should look out for when you choose to invest in website maintenance.
Plugins and Software Updates
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Plugins and software updates are very important aspects of website maintenance that cannot be wished away, especially if you’re building your website.
The reason plugin and software update is important in website management is because a large number of website plugins are usually updated at regular intervals. And as such, to keep the plugins you use on your website up to date, you have to update them whenever there’s a new update.
Now, you may be wondering, why do I have to update my website plugins?
The number one reason you want to update your website plugin is because choosing not to update it can open up your website to vulnerabilities that may lead to major malfunction or an avenue for your website to be hacked.
You want to avoid this by all means. And for that reason as part of your website maintenance ritual, you need to check your plugins and templates for updates from time to time, just to ensure that everything is exactly the way it should be.
Outdated Content and Stats
Updating your content and reviewing the stats and claims made in your content for authenticity is an important aspect of website maintenance that cannot be ignored.
Even if you’re not posting blog posts regularly on your website, periodically, you need to review the content on your website to ensure that it is still relevant both to you and your business today just as it was the day you posted it.
This content could be those written content or images or videos found on your website’s pages. You do not want to feed clients with misleading information that may lead to litigation or serious consequences for your brand.
As part of your website management routine, work on removing outdated information from your website consistently.
Website Usability
Website usability is a measure of how well a specific user can use a particular website or platform to achieve a specific outcome.
So, to understand your website usability, at intervals you need to ask the following question; “Is my website still as usable to my audience today as it ways some years or months back when I first launched the website online”?
This is one of the important questions you want to ask as you work on your periodic website maintenance.
The reason for this question is not far-fetched. In order to achieve your goal for creating the website, your website has to deliver consistently on usability.
And without a mechanism set in place to enhance your website usability, it might get really difficult to achieve your goal with the website. So, for example, you want to work on ensuring that your target audience can easily access the website and that they are able to achieve their aim of coming to the website at any given time.
If your goal is to ensure a user has access to your content when once they land on your website, be sure that that aspect of usability is achieved consistently. Ditto for other important part of website usability as you’ll define it.
Website Security Analysis
Analyzing your website security is a very important aspect of website maintenance. And you cannot ignore this by any means.
No, it may not look so obvious but without a secured website, you stand the chance to lose all your hard work, effort and important data on your website. And beyond the financial implications, this can lead to heavy litigations and sometimes severe sanctions.
So by all means, you want to ensure that your website is very well secured and your security system is top notched and right in place.
Now, one of the important steps to ensure your website security is to install a good website security plugin and update the plugin at intervals.
Also, watch out for plugin incompatibility and vulnerabilities that may arise from other plugins and softwares used on your website. And as much as possible, replace such plugins without delay.
Website Traffic Analysis
The next important aspect of website maintenance you need to pay attention to is the website traffic.
During your routine website management schedules, head over to your analytic tools to find out about your web traffic health. Identify the traffic trends to ascertain if it’s exactly the way it should be or not.
Where you notice a lot of changes, then you may need to review your marketing strategy, content types, you audience and changes in Search Engine Optimization Algorithms.
Doing this will point you to the things you’re doing wrong, the ones you’re doing rightly and other things that are noteworthy which you may need to pay some attention to either improve or sustain your traffic levels.
SEO Relevance
Is your search engine optimization strategy still as relevant today as it used to be some time back when you used the strategy? Are you still having the same rankings or are there noticeable improvements?
These are very important items on your website maintenance list. As much as possible, work on ensuring that your SEO strategy is still relevant, just as much today as it was years back.
This SEO relevance could involve things like reviewing your content, keywords, Meta tags etc., to ascertain their relevance over a certain period.
Also, you can further expand this to checking out your backlinks, reviewing both broken links and spam links that need to be disavowed to keep your website off sanctions.
These are some important aspects of website management you must commit to carry out at intervals as doing this will improve the overall results you achieve with your website.
Page Speed Analysis
Page speed is an important factor when it comes to website ranking in particular and website usability generally.
While your website gets used over the years, some plugins or softwares may become useless or bloated; causing an extra baggage that will affect your website loading speed.
To avoid this from happening, you need to make website speed analysis an important aspects of your website maintenance routine by testing your website speed using tools like Pingdom tool, GTmetrix, Google Page Speed tool etc.
And the implication of this is that periodically, you may need to check your website plugins, templates and other software and upload to ascertain their impact on your website’s loading speed. And then find ways to keep everything at optimum levels.
Conclusion
As you can see, website maintenance involves a lot of processes, routine checks and balances to ensure your website is updated properly and continuously delivers on all expected outcomes.
While these activities may look daunting, the benefits are really mouthwatering. And of course, they are achievable. So, using each of these steps and strategies, you can really get to maintain and manage your website properly with or without the need for a third party.
But if you feel you don’t have the capacity to take care of the intricacies that sometimes comes with website management, you can contact our support team or pick up our website management packages, depending on your goals and expected outcomes.
So, there you have the important website management tips that can transform the way you manage your website and the results you achieve with them.
Now the question is what’s your biggest challenge when it comes to website maintenance? Drop your answers in the comments section let’s hear you!
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