If you have invested a lot of time and money into building a proper website, by now you know that it won’t just work on its own. It needs regular service and maintenance, just like any other machine. But, how do you maintain a website? Let’s find out!
What is Web Maintenance?
To put it simply, web maintenance is the process to keep a check on your website’s functioning. This is to ensure that it’s performing smoothly and well. This way, you can keep it updated to encourage traffic growth. Here come the website maintenance services. They play a very important role in ensuring engagement, attraction, and retention of visitors. As you read further, you will come across a website maintenance checklist to help you maintain your website in a proper manner.
Why is Website Maintenance Important?
When talking about the importance of website maintenance, you should know that today, websites are your digital stores and the face of your brand. Your website is what your prospective customers will look for first. Moreover, they look for relevant information, user experience, and professionalism. This is exactly why it is super important to keep your website maintained throughout and have a website maintenance checklist. This will help you gain more traffic, retain your visitors and also gain a good search rank.
A few important reasons to maintain your website regularly are as follows:
1. Customer Satisfaction
Think from the point of view of a customer. What if they visit your website only to find out that it takes time to load, a few links are broken, it keeps on lagging, and doesn’t provide relevant information? They will have a bad user experience and start dropping out. Moreover, the traffic on your website will also go potentially down.
In order to maintain and then increase customer satisfaction, you need to maintain your website. If the website design is responsive, the content is relevant, there are no broken links, the speed is in check and it’s maintained professionally, the customers will feel happy too. After all, providing an excellent customer experience should be your first priority. If your website succeeds in impressing your customers, they will surely end up recommending it to others. Hence, more traffic.
2. SEO Boost
Did you know that Google loves well-maintained and optimized websites? Yes, and it even rewards these websites with a good search engine rank. However, if your website has broken links, is not optimized, and has poor redirects, it will only give your business a poor search engine rank. In such a case, there is a high chance of your website getting de-indexed. Driving good traffic is important for every website. So, keep updating your website with relevant and trending content, news, and good keywords to improve your SEO.
3. Improve Security
If your content and data are not secure then all your efforts, time, and money that you have put into building the website will go in vain. So the security of your website is very important. You should check for regular software updates and security patches to make your website more safe and secure. Also, remember that if you do not update your website regularly you might end up attracting hackers.
What Are The Important Tasks You Need to Perform for Regular Maintenance of Your Website?
Like you read earlier, the website needs regular service to run smoothly, just like a machine. So what are the tasks you should perform to let your website run smoothly? Show you have a website maintenance plan? Below given are the lists of weekly, monthly, and yearly tasks you should perform to maintain your website. You can use these as an eCommerce website maintenance checklist too.
1. Website Maintenance Checklist of Weekly Tasks
- You must check for 404 errors. If you find any, fix them as soon as you can.
- Blogs are an amazing source of information your customers are looking for. So, you should post at least one blog per week. Also, it will help you to improve SEO traffic.
- Do keep a check on all your forms. If they are not working properly, you might need to reset them.
- Always check for any broken links.
- Update core plugins and software weekly.
2. Website Maintenance Checklist of Monthly Tasks
- You must do regular monthly security checks. If you don’t, there is a risk of attracting hackers.
- Test the loading speed of your website monthly and fix issues, if any as soon as you can.
- It is important to keep a track of your data and analyze what’s working for you and what’s not. Prepare a monthly report analyzing the major statistics.
- The first thing to do after setting up your business website is to ensure its local search visibility. Make sure you do that too.
- Tweak content according to the trends to make it fresh and relevant.
- Don’t forget to update graphics and images
3. Website Maintenance Checklist of Yearly Tasks
- You don’t want your website to look outdated with time. So, consider a web design update yearly.
- Make sure to update the copyright date in the footer and other references.
- Do not forget to renew the domain names.
- You must always review for content accuracy. Make changes according to the moment trends and news.
- Keep updating your best-performing blogs. This will bring you more traffic and your audience is more likely to stay.
Conclusion
Now that you know what website maintenance is and why it is important, you also know that you need to start making a website maintenance plan today! After all, you don’t want your website to rank low on Google. You can simply start with the given website maintenance services list. They help you keep a track of your website performance and maintain it throughout the year. If you have any more suggestions on website maintenance, let us know in the comment section below.
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