The Essential Guide To Website Maintenance

You could have the greatest product or service in the world with a slick, compelling brand. Yet, all of this can fall flat because of one avoidable but massive mistake: your website maintenance isn’t up to par.

It is easy to neglect your website, especially if you lack a dedicated web team. However, website maintenance plays a critical part in any business’s success. Your site isn’t meant to be created once and then never touched again. Once you have it built, make note of a few tasks you need to keep up as you move forward with your online business.

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What Is Website Maintenance And Why Is It Important?

Website maintenance involves continually monitoring your website for optimal performance, safety, and health. To achieve this, you need to perform various tasks on a regular schedule. Some tasks may need to be completed weekly, while others should be done monthly, quarterly, or even once a year.

Certain tasks are also more time-sensitive than others and require due diligence. Skipping these steps can compromise your website’s security, reliability, and overall performance. This will only hurt customers’ trust in your business and affect your ranking on search engines. Website usability is one of the more prominent ranking factors in Google’s algorithms. Google uses bots to evaluate how easy your web pages are to use and whether persistent problems exist.

By taking charge, you can increase the visibility of your business across search engine results pages. Website maintenance can be a time-consuming task, though. This is why so many turn to outsourcing this task to trusted web companies who can do it for you. Just A Web Company has years of experience in website maintenance. We can help you keep your site working exactly as it should.

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Websites have many moving parts, which can make them overwhelming, especially if you lack the time or resources to monitor every single factor. Fortunately, website maintenance does not need to be tackled all at once. Instead, you can break it up by how often these tasks must be completed.

Weekly Tasks

• Backup Your Site: You need to ensure your site stays live. What often seems like a simple plugin update or article edit can lead to blank pages and broken websites. Regular site backups help prevent these hiccups from turning into countless hours of lost work. If your site has an automatic backup plugin, make sure it is functioning properly. It is also a good idea to download copies of your website onto a secure hard drive.
• Scan Your Site For 404 Errors: Broken links lead to a negative user experience, which affects your bounce rate, SEO, and brand reputation. Use tools to check for broken 404 links and have them removed or redirected through a 301 redirect.
• Review Key Metrics: Google Analytics provides a ton of useful information about how people find and use your website. Make sure your site is doing what you want, and figure out what needs improvement. Other website performance tools can help you review your key metrics (KPIs) and compare your site’s performance week over week.
• Create Content: An easy way to keep your site updated is by making one to two blog posts per week in order to continue providing customers or clients with value. Consistently uploading new information will keep them coming back. This also keeps your content fresh and up-to-date so clients know that you keep up with your industry.
• Clear Spam: A site littered with spam comments loses credibility among your potential clients, so cleaning them up is vital.

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Monthly Tasks

• Check For Security Updates: It is not uncommon to hear about online security breaches, which makes securing your website a high priority. One of the most important practices to build into your maintenance plan is regularly checking that your platforms, plug-ins, and scripts are updated and secure. This can be done through security scan services.
• Track Website Analytics: This task should also be done monthly. It ensures you get the most out of your site and content and provides a good visual of whether your site is achieving its goals.
• Test Site Speed: Use tools to check your website’s speed. It’s especially important to check speed on different devices and browsers. Ideally, pages should take no longer than 1-2 seconds to load.
• Inspect Site Features: Use your website as a potential client and test out any forms, call-to-action (CTA) buttons, popups, or checkout processes to ensure they work correctly. This includes checking any plugins that could affect your website.

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Quarterly Tasks

• General Review of Website: Take the time to review and potentially optimize different aspects of your site, including titles, meta descriptions, links, alt text, body content, and CTAs. Also, be on the lookout for miscellaneous issues, such as incorrect information.
• Update Website Content: Now is a good time to update your website’s content, such as graphics, photos, and other information. Ensure any media, especially images, loads quickly on your site. You should also regularly tweak your campaigns to reflect shifting market trends and a changing consumer base.
• Automate tasks: Automate manual, repetitive tasks to speed up maintenance processes and workflows.

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Annual Tasks

• Domain Renewal: This refers to reviewing and renewing your domain name, hosting service, and any additional tools you use to keep your site working as it should. This includes updating any legal policies, privacy policies, or other important information you keep in your footer.
• Design Evaluation: Annual design evaluations ensure your site remains user-friendly, attractive, and in line with contemporary design standards. Customers are also more likely to use your website or contact your business if your design is modern, rather than outdated. Once you determine if your website requires an updated design, you can look for a web design company to refresh the site’s look.
• Content Audit: Although it can be time-consuming, an audit can highlight underperforming content, providing you with an opportunity for optimization or repurposing them to increase reach. You should also review all content for errors, typos, and outdated information.
• Add Or Update Visuals: In addition to the content audit, you should check all graphics, images, and other visual elements to ensure they’re still relevant. If not, refresh the design of the page by updating it with new visuals.
• Compare Yearly Website Metrics: By using the metrics you have collected throughout the year, you can more effectively see if your site is meeting the yearly goals you set. Keeping on top of your site’s goals also helps you find places for improvement.
• Test Your Entire Site: After you have made the necessary updates and performance fixes throughout the year, you should check that they all still work. Update outdated information, too, and analyze all features to ensure optimal performance.

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Selecting The Right Website Maintenance Partner

When it comes to web maintenance, there are a number of options. You can choose to do it yourself, hire an in-house team, or outsource to an agency that specializes in digital marketing and website upkeep.

The sheer number of tasks can intimidate business owners looking to create and maintain their own site. While it is possible to learn all the skills necessary to keep your site running optimally, time plays a major factor in whether this is feasible. For most, it is not. These are ongoing tasks that take you away from managing the rest of your company.

This is why many businesses, both local and nationwide, turn to service providers for their website maintenance needs. A website maintenance service provider is an individual or company hired to keep your site updated, secure, and performing well. This makes it vital to choose the right one.

When looking to hire a website service provider, take stock of the services they offer. This can easily be done by listing out the tasks you need help with and asking the provider about their ability to execute the work. During this time, you should also inquire about their response times. Though rare, you must ensure that your provider can respond swiftly to your concerns, questions, or requests in case of a site meltdown.

You should also take the time to learn more about their experience and expertise. Service providers with years of experience and expertise tend to bring the most value, especially because their procedures are often smoother and have data to show their effectiveness. Look for references, reviews, and testimonials from previous clients, too.

Of course, your budget plan and their pricing should be compatible. Consider how the cost might scale up as your business grows, so you know exactly what you will be getting. You need something that fits your budget and can still offer what you need.

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Just A Web Company Is Your Website Maintenance Provider

You don’t need to become an expert in website maintenance to have a site that works well and brings in new customers. Handing it off to a trusted web service provider is a great way to ensure an optimized site and increase your visibility online.

Whether you are just getting started with your website or have had it for years, Just A Web Company can help you with all your website service tasks. Our developers have years of experience with everything from optimization to updating content. We also use the latest tools to ensure our clients’ sites are always running optimally. Contact us today to get started!

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