Having just a static website on the World Wide Web isn’t going to do you a whole lot of good in the long
run. You need to work on it as well. You have to maintain it, promote it, fix broken links (if any), and do a
whole lot of similar jobs to ensure that the website stays right in order. The following tips can come in
handy for you.
1. Check your site speed
Your website loading speed can have a significant influence on search engine rankings and conversion
rates, either for your good or your bad.
Take a closer peek at the following statistics to know how your website loading speed can make all the
differences in the world:
- Most customers expect a site to load within less than 2 seconds.
- 40% of your customers will leave your site immediately if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
- For every 1 second increase in load time, your site conversion rate drops by 7%.
- For every 1 second increase in load time, your user satisfaction rate drops by 16%.
Therefore, you must monitor the speed of your site at periodic intervals, preferably weekly or monthly,
and take immediate steps to optimize the same once you notice the speed dropping below a certain
feasible level.
The following tools can come in handy for you:
2. Look for broken links and images
The World Wide Web is constantly changing. Meaning, URLs are changing, images are changing, video
links are also changing; so you see nothing actually stays the same.
If you link other sites and media throughout your website (which is a good practice by the way), you will
need to verify and ensure that each and every link, be it external or internal, is working perfectly or not.
Broken links are a common phenomenon of the World Wide Web. Hence, you must always stay vigilant
during your site maintenance routine and do your best to keep this pesky little problem at bay in the
best possible manner.
Note: You may use a free tool called Xenu Lunk Sleuth for broken link verifications.
3. If you offer promotions and deals, make sure they are updated
In case you have an e-commerce site where you reward your customers with regular deals and
promotions, you must ensure that they are well-maintained.
Say for example,
You had offered a New Year sale to customers at a flat 25% discount for the first week of January. And
then, in February, the banner of the “New Year sale” is still showing up on the first page your site. Do
you think it will send a good message to your customer?
So always keep a careful tab on these things.
4. Don’t forget to check your domain name
Don’t forget to ensure that your domain name is registered at all possible times.
Some people have no idea as to when their domain name’s going to expire over time. And then, there are also a huge number of people who are either too careless or too lethargic to check these things out and then one day the site just goes down right out of the blues.
So do ensure you don’t lie in that category because if you do, this practice can severely hurt the performance of your site in the long run.
- Contact information and forms
If your site has any kind of newsletter sign-ups, contact forms, subscriptions, and other similar things for customers, you should make it a point to check these features out at least once a month to confirm that they are in a fine working condition.
If you notice any issue, go for the fix immediately.
- Check whether backups are okay or not
Make sure to check whether the backups done on your database and website are okay or not.
Also, don’t forget to check whether they can be restored whether any problem or not.
- Check for website errors
You will be able to check all your website error log files and messages via the Google Webmaster tools.
Your website maintenance checklist
Before you start…
- You need to install Google Analytics.
- You have to sign yourself up on the Google Webmaster Tool and confirm your business site.
- You need a backup service for daily website database backups and weekly complete site backups. We recommend BackupBuddy for this exact purpose of yours. Other alternatives are Google Drive or Dropbox.
- You need to monitor the security of your website via automatic scanning. Recommended tool is Sucuri.
- You also need to monitor your website uptime at periodic intervals. Recommended tools are Uptime Robot and Pingdom (one that’s already mentioned in the first part of this article).
WEEKLY website maintenance checklist
- Check whether all your front end pages are opening without errors or not.
- Check whether daily backups are performed flawlessly or not.
- You may need to update the software of your content management system and plug-ins at regular intervals. Check whether any update’s available or not. If it is available, update them without any further ado.
- Check all the lead capturing forms of your website. If you notice a problem, go for the fix immediately.
- Check whether there’s any issue with promotional mails and business mails sent from your web server.
- Look for spam comments and remove them.
- Look for broken links.
- Check for 404 errors. Resolve these errors (if any) by redirections or link fixes.
- Write and post at least one blog post for your blog page (if you don’t have a blog page, install one immediately). Don’t forget to promote it as well on social networking and bookmarking sites for your own marketing gains.
MONTHLY website maintenance checklist
- Check the loading speed of your website. If it’s more than 3 seconds, you have a problem.
- Check security scans. Resolve issues (if there’s any).
- Review your website statistics via Google Analytics. Which pages are performing the best? Which are performing the worst? Can you do anything to give your seemingly unpopular pages a boost in the right direction? If you can, do it NOW!
- Check your website’s local search visibility.
QUARTERLY website maintenance checklist
- Give your website a thorough SEO audit. Can it be improved? Note down the points through which it can be improved for the overall benefit of your business and audience.
- Are your site photos and graphics up to date? Can you improve them further to make them go with the current trend?
- Review your site’s meta description and title pages. Edit them (if necessary).
- Tweak your conversion messages and form to improve your customer conversion rates.
- Test whether your website’s working perfectly on all devices or not (i.e., on phone, tablet, and PC).
- Review your website’s advertising campaigns and adjust them if necessary.
- Check your uptime logs. If the uptime is less than 99.9%, you have a problem. Consider changing your hosting service if they can’t solve the issue.
YEARLY website maintenance checklist
- Update your site’ copyright date. You will probably find it in your website footer.
- Review each and every page of your site for content relevance.
- Review the domain name of your website and change it (if necessary).
- Consider updating the design of your website to freshen things up.
So that’s basically it. Just stick to the tips mentioned above to the best of your abilities, and you will see significant improvements happening in your business operations for sure. With that, we’ll bring this topic to an end for now. Hope you had a good read.
