Website Maintenance - 21 May 2019

Useful Tips For Website Maintenance

When building your website, you need to know that it is not something you create once and then you are free to leave it, while it will run by itself, like magic. You need to continue caring for it and do ongoing maintenance to ensure it will continue to do the job you need it to do.

Here are a few website maintenance tasks that you need to remember to add to your monthly checklist:

1. Perform User Testing:

The easiest way to ensure that your website is working as it should be is actually browsing it through as a regular visitor would.

If you do weekly visits, tests, or purchases on your website, you will know exactly how your customers are navigating your site, and you will immediately notice if there is something that is not working as it should be.

Also a good idea is to bring in people who aren’t associated with your business or brand, who can give fresh eyes to browsing your website. Make sure your testing includes all browsers and device types that visitors may use, so you get the full picture.

2. Back Up Your Website Often:

This is one of the most crucial tasks and one of the most overlooked, but trust me you won’t regret doing it when you need it. And even though backing up does not keep your website clean and fresh, this helps if some trouble arises. So, always have a backup of your website, at least on a monthly basis. Don’t forget you can also backup daily blogs, weekly news, etc.

3. Update security measures:

Especially, but not only, if your website is an e-commerce site, sensitive data might be running through it, so you need to be sure no one has access to it who is not supposed to. You need to run security tests somewhat frequently, so that your website is always up to date with the latest security measures.

4. Check on broken links:

Broken links can gain a bad reputation for the company. The links which are not working, or are taking the visitors to some other unwanted site may annoy the users.

Also, keep in mind that an excess of broken links can make your website unusable and you will lose a lot of traffic. Search engines may even penalize you if your website cannot send people to the proper page. You might need to fix the link itself or create a whole new page.

5. Optimize Your Database:

The database is where all your website content is stored. This covers blogs, images, videos, pages, settings, and many other things. As your website grows, your database begins to get packed, which decreases the website’s speed.

If you want to improve your website’s performance, you need to optimize your database. By utilizing plugins, you can easily optimize the database of your website and improve its speed, and you will also be able to remove spam comments, unwanted posts, unwanted post revisions, etc.

Just like a car or home maintenance, your website maintenance is crucial, and it’s a never-ending effort if you want to keep thriving online.

It’s essential that if you don’t have the time or knowledge to do so, you get help from experts to save risk, time, money, and unnecessary trouble in the long run.