What is included in website maintenance? The Complete Manual

website maintenance

Image by Freepik

The practise of keeping your website updated and operational with any updates or additions is known as website maintenance. This article lists all the essential elements of website maintenance to keep you in the lead and help you avoid website issues in the future.

Websites are like new cars. They require maintenance and upkeep in your company just as much as any other asset (and sometimes even more)! The size of the business is irrelevant because every website need maintenance; whether it’s weekly, biweekly, or daily updates, do what suits you best!

In conclusion, once you have created a website, you must always keep it updated. However, despite its importance, website maintenance is frequently neglected. Why, then, should website maintenance even be emphasised? Do you want potential clients to think your website is out-of-date? Obviously not. None of them do. And that’s why you must emphasis frequent website maintenance.

Nevertheless, 87% of websites pose high or moderate security threats. % of websites use out-of-date software with known security flaws. Additionally, 77% of mobile websites take longer than 10 seconds to load. These statistics all affect your website. As a result, they could push or pull away your clients. Hence, emphasizing website maintenance keeps your site up and running.

Let’s get back to the core question: What does website maintenance include? Website owners can carry out a variety of duties to keep their website operational. Let’s uncover everything you need to do on a regular basis to maintain the health of your website.

What Is Website Maintainance?

Updating and fixing a website are both considered to be part of website maintenance. Search engines will penalise out-of-date websites by giving them a lower rating than other websites if they aren’t updated frequently.

Websites with broken links, broken images, and out-of-date content can discourage users from visiting your site. Most websites eventually need maintenance, either because the client requests an update or because something is broken.

Maintaining a Website is Important for Businesses

All websites, regardless of their size or shape, need to be updated occasionally. This maintenance can take many different forms, including content modifications, SEO copywriting, SEO link development, etc. The care given to a website, when frequent updates are made in response to market demands, is referred to as website maintenance.

It entails taking steps to ensure that your website runs without any hiccups or problems that could impair its functionality. Maintaining your website will maintain its content up to date and accurate, guarantee that users have a great experience when viewing it, and keep it safe from hackers.

What Does Website Maintenance Include?

Website Testing (Annually)

It’s crucial to constantly test your website. Additionally, a lot of website designers suggested that all websites undergo annual testing by a complete digital agency. Why? Because yearly website testing ensures that the website functions as intended and is free of broken links and non-functional features, which can negatively impact users, search engine rankings, and brand perception. So, perform a yearly website test.

Testing for Browser Compatibility

For a number of reasons, testing for browser compatibility is essential for managing websites. The website must function on all of the many operating systems and browsers that users may use to access it. You risk losing a consumer if they are unable to access the website owing to compatibility concerns. Additionally, even if the website is updated, compatibility issues with particular browsers may still exist.

Check for Software Updates (Monthly)

As the owner of a website, you are aware of how it operates, what it performs, and what type of functionality it requires. However, since technology is constantly evolving, websites must also be updated to maximise their features and security requirements. Monthly software updates have a role in this. A monthly check for software upgrades is essential in these situations.

Site Backup

For a website to operate correctly, maintenance and upkeep are crucial. Because it stores all of the data that has been entered into the website, site backups are crucial for website maintenance. This comprises content, files, and other items that are necessary to the smooth operation of the website. Additionally, this is quite useful for restoring a backup after damage that causes the site to lose functionality or experience any other kind of interruption or malfunction.

Measuring Results (Weekly)

It’s crucial to evaluate your website’s performance every week, especially if you want to succeed. This is so that changes in a particular behaviour, experience, or circumstance can only be seen after careful observation over an extended period of time. With the ongoing change in users’ online preferences and behaviours, websites that don’t measure their results risk falling behind. As a result, you should check your website’s results every week.

What Are the Main Advantages of Website Maintenance?

A higher ranking on search engines

“Set it and forget it” is a thing of the past. Today, maintaining a website is more about assuring its success than it is about averting expensive downtime. Today, consistent website maintenance helps websites rank higher in search results.

If you’ve tried maintaining a badly optimised website for weeks, months, or even years without making any adjustments, you’re undoubtedly ready to try anything to win Google back. As a result, regular website upgrades lead to higher search engine rankings.

Up-To-Date Website

There are various ways to update a website. Regular website maintenance is one approach. It assists you in checking a site’s content to ensure that all important information, like contact details and current policies, are accurate.

A web administrator can modify details that are erroneous or missing data to give users accurate information and more. Therefore, hiring a website maintenance service will pay off for you because it will maintain your site up to date and functional.

More Customer Engagement

You must continually keep your website updated if you want to remain relevant to your current clients and draw in new ones. And website maintenance can aid you in that. Customers want a website to be well-kept, polished, and updated.

The image of your company may suffer if the site starts to reveal its age. Many companies don’t understand how crucial website maintenance is until they fall behind. Avoid making that mistake and start using website maintenance services right away to increase consumer engagement.

Improved Brand Image

On a client’s website a few days ago, Lexy Jane read an article about website upkeep. To her amazement, the client had only published one post in the previous 12 months. This is just one example of why website maintenance is so important.

Because they are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, websites are essential for developing your brand’s reputation and image. Taking a site down for months at a time and not allowing customers and interested parties to view updated content is highly damaging to any brand’s image or reputation.

Higher Sales

It can be challenging and time-consuming to run a website. However, it’s necessary to keep up with the latest trends and technology changes to attract as many prospective customers as possible.

Why is it crucial to update your website then? One of the main reasons is higher sales! If you fail to update your site regularly, consumers will seek out other, updated sites that can provide more information and better descriptions.

Enhanced User Experience (UX)

Website maintenance is typically related to poorly functioning or accessible websites. However, it appears that this might really enhance the user experience. Maintenance keeps website information up-to-date and interesting, demonstrating relevance to what is happening in the world.

If a site isn’t maintained, regular visits could produce outdated information. All in all, maintenance keeps website details up-to-date and relevant to user needs. Maintaining websites also helps to avoid problems that might harm user experience.

Enhanced Security

No matter what kind of website it is or where it is housed, security is a key component. Regular maintenance activities can be carried either manually or on an automated basis to update security features on a website.

More often than not, websites are targeted for malicious intent because they’re left unmonitored and unmanaged. Fortunately, there are simple things web admins can do to improve the security of their websites, including SSL implementation, performing website backup, updating software, etc.

How Is Website Maintenance Performed? The Complete Checklist

Weekly Checklist
  • Check for broken links
  • Update image alt tag descriptions
  • Check for broken images
  • Create a copy of current posts/pages in case they get deleted or corrupted and prevent them from being lost if your database gets hacked.
  • Store the files on an external hard drive
  • Update thumbnails for posts and pages that have changed since the last update.
  • Scan your website for malware. If you don’t have a scanner, Google “website malware scanner.”
  • Ensure that the administrative email address of your site is working and can receive emails from visitors who encounter errors
Monthly Checklist
  • Update website content
  • Update scripts and plugins
  • Check for bugs in the website
  • Perform security scans on the website
  • Update server environment (OS, PHP, MySQL, Apache/NGINX, HTTP
  • Back up the current data stored on the website’s files and databases
  • Perform a manual optimisation on the server environment with NGINX/apache
  • Check and fix permissions issues
  • Review and update links with Google webmaster tools
Quarterly Checklist
  • Force-cache all dynamic pages in the CMS dashboard
  • Review settings for plugins that are no longer being used to disable them
  • Backup databases and files, store copies in a remote location off-site
  • Check plugin compatibility with the current version of CMS
  • Clean up unused tags, categories, posts from your old blog posts if needed
  • Delete comments that violate website policies
  • Review and update sitemap regularly
  • Check and fix permissions issues
  • Review and update links with Google webmaster tools
  • Update the root files to ensure search engine crawlers can index new content
  • Remove unwanted metadata from the header on pages if necessary
  • Check if the Google Analytics account is installed, verify it is configured correctly
Yearly Checklist
  • Ensure all images are served via HTTPS
  • Check for any hardware issues
  • Ensure the website is mobile responsive
  • Check for the broken links throughout the websites
  • Update copyright year
  • Update blog
  • Update social media profiles
  • Check for broken scripts throughout the website
  • Ensure online forms are working properly
  • Update the root files to ensure search engine crawlers can index new content
  • Remove unwanted metadata from the header on pages if necessary
  • Update website content to reflect recent events (i.e new locations, new products etc)
  • Switch to SSL if not already on HTTPS
  • Backup the site’s database and restore it into staging environment to confirm all

When Should Website Maintenance Be Performed?

To make sure the website is operating effectively and smoothly, most websites need to be updated at least once a month. This procedure could involve software updates, a check for broken links, and the editing or adding content. The frequency of updates and renovations will depend on the type of website and how often it changes.

So, how frequently should a website be updated?

Websites that are updated often typically require more frequent maintenance than websites that are not. For  example, an online retailer may have a variety of items for sale on its website at various price points. It could be necessary to update the website’s home page if one of those items’ prices changes. This can call for maintenance to be performed numerous times each day or week, depending on how frequently the rates vary.

How Much Does Website Maintenance Cost?

Web maintenance is the most basic level of website support. Website maintenance includes activities such as updating content, fixing broken links, etc. However, most websites have to be updated more frequently than these basic services allow for, leading to annual website management plans.

Annual website maintenance plans are packages that may also generate reports on search engine rankings, handle social network integrations, scan for malware and viruses, or track site visitors.

These should take care of your regular updates and ensure that everything goes well throughout the year (or even multiple years). The size of a company/website will generally determine how often it needs an update; however, some companies will also want specific updates done more often than others.

Conclusion

Any business that wishes to succeed online must perform the necessary and essential work of website maintenance. Let’s say you want your website to perform well in search engine results, offer the finest user experience, or keep up with all of Google’s constantly evolving guidelines and upgrades. Then it’s time to devote some time to routine maintenance.

Overall, routine website maintenance ensures that the website runs properly and without errors. The ideal website maintenance partner will go deep into your website and work with you to maintain it functional, current, and updated.

Share on facebook
Share on twitter
Share on linkedin

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Testimonials
Get a Free Quote!

Tell us about your project concept and we will get back to you within 1 business day.

Login