What is Website Maintenance?
Website maintenance is simply the upkeep behind keeping your website up and running smoothly. The tasks involve ensure that your site remains safe, secure and continues to offer great user experience.
Website maintenance is crucial for keeping your expensive digital asset delivering the results you want. Activities can include:
- Security updates
- Changing content
- Design audit
- Analytic metrics
- Technical audit
Why is Website Upkeep Important?
Most importantly, you want your website to work and that's why website upkeep is crucial. A website that doesn't have optimal performance can severely affect your conversion rate.
The average load speed for a website is 1.65 seconds, meaning if your website isn't up to scratch you could be losing out on valuable business.
Unfortunately, when your website is published live it cannot survive without at least some upkeep on a regular basis. Like any digital asset, websites age over time and when cracks begin to show the effectiveness of a site is put in jeopardy.
Regular updates ensure that your customers, who's first impression of your business is often your website, remain satisfied. There are many other reasons why website maintenance is important, such as:
- Improved SEO
- Optimised user experience
- Security
Website Maintenance Checklist
Before you even get started on these regular tasks you need to backup your website. Having regular backups means that if anything were to go wrong while uploading a new article or creating a new page, you can recover your website.
Most CMS offer automatic backups, however it's always a good idea to store a backup, backup on a hard drive as a failsafe.
Once you've set up a regular backup schedule in your CMS you can start to focus on the following tasks.
Weekly Upkeep Tasks
Firstly, we'll focus on the website maintenance tasks you should be performing on a weekly basis.
Fix broken links
Links have multiple great functions on a website. They can improve user experience by leading visitors to other helpful content, increasing both your authority and time onsite. The same is for external links you place on your website. Sourcing properly signals to a user that your website is trustworthy.
A great linking structure also does more than just offer a positive user experience. Your linking architecture can determine how easy or hard it is for Google to crawl your website. Websites with optimal linking structure are more likely to rank well on search engine pages because Google can easily crawl through their site to find and index every page.
When you have broken links Google cannot index those pages. This signals to the search engine that there's something not quite right with your site which will in turn affect your search engine ranking.
Since your search engine ranking is so important to your business' online, you'll want to regularly check the links on your website. You can use tools like Google Search Console to identify if you have any broken links and where to find them.
Check website forms
The goal of most website owners is to capture new customers. Once a visitor has managed to find your business and you've convinced them to go forward with your product or service you want them to be able to contact you. The way in which many businesses do this is through integrated forms on their website.
If form submissions are your main converter on your website, checking these weekly is vital. Submit a test form often to check that the user experience is optimal, meaning it's not difficult for a visitor to fill out and submit.
You will also want to check that you are receiving the information from the form properly. Whether it's via email, your CMS or CRM system, check that all the information is translating properly.
Another form you may want to check is your email marketing submission form. Permissions are imperative in many countries across the world to send marketing material to somebody's email inbox. So make sure all this information is also being inputted correctly.
Stay on top of updates
Most CMS and plugins require regular updates to keep performing optimally. A good weekly check is just to ensure that everything remains up to date in the backend. This step is vital because certain updates could affect the compatibility of your website and the plugins that you use.
This is a technical maintenance task, so don't be disheartened if you feel you lack the skills to do this yourself. This is why hiring web development experts to keep on top of these tasks is very common.
Developers that are the magic behind the website builders and plugins you use are constantly updating and improving their applications to benefit you and your website. So don't forget this one!
Review Google Search Console
A quick and easy one to do!
If you don't have Google Search Console set up for your website you are missing out on vital updates. It's easy to set up, just add a small bit of code to your website and Google will begin tracking the search engine data it has for your website.
Reviewing Search Console can give you plenty of insights you'll want to see on a weekly basis. For example, you can see the search terms that users are visiting you through, your website traffic and click through rate.
Search Console will also inform you of any crawling or indexing issues with your website which you'll want to remedy quickly. This is why regularly reviewing Search Console is key to your website maintenance schedule.
Post new content
SEO best practices include consistently adding new content to your website, whether this be new blog posts, projects, podcasts or other. Posting new content weekly signals to Google that your website is not only active, but also offers up to date information.
Google's goal is to serve it's searchers with the most accurate and up to date answer to their search query. Hence, if your website offers consistent, new content you are much more likely to appear highly on Google's search results.
New content can also keep exisiting customers engaged. If you have a mailing list, then having new website can drive these subscribers back to your site, giving more opportunity for them to convert.
Monthly Upkeep Tasks
Next are the monthly tasks you will want to undertake to keep your website well optimised.
Review analytics and performance
To keep your website performing at its best you need to be well aware of it's current performance. You can use Google Analytics, Search Console and other tools like SEMRush to see which pages are your top performers and which may be holding you back.
You should be looking out for a range of metrics. High bounce rates on certain pages can signal that the content on that page isn't relevant or helpful. Low search engine rankings could mean that your page isn't properly optimised for your desired keywords. A decreasing conversion rate on certain pages often means it's time to try a new strategy.
By checking your website analytics monthly you can focus your efforts on optimising and improving parts of your website that need it. Use heatmaps to try to find any problem areas or popular features that work well.
Check and remedy load speed
Your website needs to load quickly to perform at its best. Load speed is such an important factor to your website's success that we've written a whole article about it! But we will cover how to check your load speed and remedy it here too.
Your load speed should be checked monthly as new content and updates could negatively affect how quickly your website runs. You can do this via Google Search Console or Google's Core Web Vitals tool. These tools will not only tell you important metrics like how long it takes for your website to load, but also any problems that may be present.
Some quick ways to improve your website's load speed can include:
- Decreasing image file sizes
- Reducing the amount of redirects onsite
- Enabling browser caching
You could do this task weekly, however monthly is often more than enough to ensure that your website is up and running quickly.
Optimise existing content
As well as posting new content each week you should be reviewing and optimising old content. Noticed that one of your blogs is stuck in the top 20 search results? Or your competitor has just overtaken you in the number one spot? Maybe it's time to revisit it and give it the SEO boost it badly needs.
Find low hanging fruit through your monthly website analysis and give the content an update. You don't need to completely rewrite the content, instead add a few keywords here and there or update any images that may not be relevant anymore.
Google loves when exisiting content gets updated for accuracy. It signals to the search engine that your website is committed to providing trustworthy information. Often this will be rewarded in higher search engine rankings.
Quarterly & Yearly Upkeep Tasks
Finally, here are the tasks you should be undertaking on a quarterly or yearly basis. These are important and not to be missed, even though they are less frequent.
Update imagery and information
You want your website to always be the most accurate source of information about your business. While you are optimising exisiting content monthly throughout the year, it can be easy to miss small pieces of information or images that might not be relevant anymore.
Each quarter you should spend like spring cleaning your website for any misinformation. Read your blogs and check that what you're saying is still true. Make sure that if you've had a big business change (for instance, location change or new team members) that this is reflected in every instance it occurs on your website.
The internet moves fast nowadays, so a quarterly checks are imperative to keep your website maintained well.
Analyse any room for improvement
A yearly design audit is always best practice. While a complete design re-do might not always be necessary, it is recommended that you get a new website every 3-5 years to remain on trend and technologically up to date.
By auditing your current design yearly you can extend the life of your current website with small updates. For example, if your website currently lacks interactive elements you could get these added in rather than paying for a completely new website. Your design should be both on brand but also relevant to your current market.
It's not just your design you should be auditing though. You can also analyse whether your CTAs need an update. Depending on your target audience, there might be changes in the way your audience react to certain calls to action.
For instance, Generation Z are less reactive to strong CTAs like 'Buy now', instead try something less aggressive perhaps.
You may also want to use heatmaps to see if you should change your page format. If the most clicked part of your page is hard to reach, then move it up and so on. Take time yearly to focus on these aspects to keep your website consistently improving.
Update footer
A super easy one to do yearly, make sure your footer information is all correct. This includes:
- Contact information
- Terms of service
- Privacy policy
- Copyright info
- Certifications
- Important links
It might be necessary to double check any legalities involved in your privacy policy and copyright information, but not always.
Security
Most modern CMS and website builders have a built in security wall, keeping your and your customer's data secure from any hackers. It is also a good idea to check whether all those who have access to the backend of your website still need to do so. This could be ex-employees or agencies you once worked with but don't anymore.
To keep your website secure make sure that the only people who have access to edit or change your website are those who need to.
Should I Pay for Website Maintenance?
You may feel overwhelmed by this checklist and we understand. Keeping your website up to date isn't an easy task though it may seem like it on the surface. As a busy business owner it can be a lot of work to undertake on your own, or by your team. That's why many people opt to use website maintenance services by professional web developers.
Should you pay for website maintenance in Australia? Well that all depends on your expertise and time. Letting your website fall into dismay can have an extremely negative affect on business coming through your site, so website maintenance isn't optional. What is optional is whether you do it yourself or hire a professional.
Get in touch if you need a hand from our web development professionals in Melbourne.
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