Website maintenance is the upkeep of a website, including repairs and updates. It can be very different from one site to another, depending on the type of business, size of the company, and other factors.
Before you put your website live, it is important to look through a list of items that may cause issues once the website becomes accessible by web browsers. A website maintenance checklist will allow you to discover and resolve problems before customers have a bad experience on your site. These problems include glitches on the user interface, broken links, and server timeouts.
Why is website maintenance necessary?
Website maintenance plan ensures that you keep your website fresh, up-to-date and relevant to both users and search engines. To do this, high quality content must be developed regularly which requires planning in advance through strategies such as recurring posts or publishing content ahead of time using scheduling tools like Hootsuite. Not only does regular content development help retain existing visitors, it will also attract new visitors to your site and help you become a thought leader in your industry.
Checklist You Should Follow to Avoid Technical Glitches
The days of launching a website and forgetting about it until you need to make some updates or repairs are long gone. Today, most people (including myself) expect their websites to be both reliable and secure at all times, and will not hesitate to take their business elsewhere if this is not the case.
Here’s my Website Maintenance Checklist for site owners who want to avoid technical glitches in order to keep visitors coming back for more.
1. Website Speed
Visitors want quick loading times when browsing your site or playing games on various browsers. If they have to wait too long for pages to load, they'll simply go elsewhere with their business - potentially never to return! Make speed a priority in the midst of all the other work that goes into maintaining a site. To maximize speed:
● Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
● Utilize browser caching
● Reduce image file sizes and number of images
● Optimize the size of videos on the site (if applicable)
It takes less than one second for users to form an impression about your site when they first arrive. If they have to wait too long before anything happens or content appears on the screen, they may very likely leave in search of faster loading pages. Site speed is just one reason why Mobile Optimization is so important.
2. Examine and test the entire website
Even if you've conducted thorough quality assurance testing on your site, it's important to check again with every update. This is especially true for e-commerce stores, but any business can benefit from a walkthrough after updating their web content or files. Try clicking around the site as if you were a customer and see what happens:
There are five areas that should be checked on a regular basis, including your site’s security, content check to ensure no broken links or missing images, server health checks, plugin compatibility tests to make sure everything works as it should, and ongoing SEO performance reviews.
3. Renew Website Domain Name and SSL Certificate
As time goes by your website needs renewing too! It is always good practice to make sure you have renewed both your domain name (if it includes services like email) and SSL certificate before they expire.
It's important for you to renew the domain name on time as well as purchase or update an SSL certificate whether it is DV or OV depending on your company's preferences so that users of your website will be confident knowing they are accessing the official version of your site with secure connection encryption.
4. Check for SEO and broken links
Make sure all your internal links work properly by visiting every link on your website, checking if they are leading to the correct place. You can use a free tool called onlink.com to check every link on your website and repair any broken ones easily.
Sometimes after linking to resources on your website, there are some links that don’t work anymore due to changes in the target websites or their removal altogether. This means you are losing valuable SEO juice and traffic from these resources. You can use Google Webmaster Tools to find out which of the pages on your site have no follow links pointing towards them. Then go through each of these listed pages and remove any broken links using tools like Check My Links by Yoast Plugin for WordPress.
For example; over 1/3 of all organic clicks go to the top 3 search entries, Google’s algorithm updates are becoming more frequent which means that pages are dropping in rankings at a faster rate. Broken links can also take visitors away from your site which is something you want to avoid.
5. Remove Duplicate Content
It's important to remove all the duplicate content from your website that was indexed by search engines during the time of migration. If you use a plugin like WPML for your multi language website then it is better to create a new home page and sitemap for each version which will automatically exclude those pages from being indexed now.
If in case your site was affected by the Mozaffar and Penguin updates, or Google's new Panda algorithm, there's a good chance that you've accumulated some duplicate content issues over time that need to be resolved. To do this, conduct a complete audit on your website using a tool like Screaming Frog . Identify any links pointing to pages with the same content as other pages of yours (including links from within your own site), and remove them. You may also want to use SEOmoz's SEO Spider , which works similarly but more thoroughly crawls websites for duplicate content problems . It can even identify whether the same canonical URL has been pointed to using a 301 redirect or has been blocked via robots.txt .
6. Optimize The Site’s Database
Now is also a good time to perform database optimization if needed, as this step is often missed out by most webmasters because it can be very time consuming. WordPress installations with large databases (>500MB) should be optimized on a monthly basis to avoid slowness and other problems that may arise due to outdated data or fragmented tables. You can use tools like WP-Optimize for this purpose.
Having a regularly updated database with accurate information makes it easier for your website visitors and search engine bots alike to find what they need quickly and easily without having to trawl through pages of irrelevant information.
7. Make Full Website Backups
Make sure you have a full backup of your site ready to be restored in case anything goes wrong or is modified by a hacker or virus attack, one way you can achieve this is having a daily scheduled backup from your hosting control panel and then retain it for 60 days, after which do another schedule for the next 60 days again. Creating backups is important so that you won't have to go through the tedious process of reinstalling everything again in case something goes wrong. One of our favorite WordPress backup plugins is UpdraftPlus which allows you to schedule automated backups and store them off-site at popular cloud storage services like Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud etc.
Also always make a full backup of your site before you do any other update to it in case the new changes are not desirable and something goes wrong, you can then just copy back the previous version if need be which will save time should an emergency arise when you have to fix something immediately.
8. Review and update legal disclaimers
If you’re running an online business, chances are that your website includes some type of legal disclaimer or privacy policy page. You must keep these pages updated so users know the current content of these documents at all times.
Website maintenance includes reviewing all the terms and conditions on your site including privacy policies, disclaimers about online purchases etc, this is important because when someone violates these they will hold you responsible so checking them over regularly ensures everything is up to date with recent changes in law.
Conclusion
Website maintenance is just like taking care of your job: you have to be present and work on it in order for everything to run smoothly. Don’t make things hard yourself by ignoring these basic principles when hosting a website! By following our checklist, we guarantee that the contents will always stay up-to date with no malware or other harmful viruses lurking around ready to hurt us unsuspecting visitors; so go ahead - do what makes sense based off this information as well as others who may know more about websites than ourselves (like Google).
Web developers are an essential part of any project, especially if you want a site that looks professional and functions well. At Pixel Street - A Web Design Company in Kolkata, our team provides high-quality standards throughout every step from initial consultations up until providing clients with fully customized sites at affordable prices!
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