Recently we published an article about why your business needs a website. A web presence is a great tool to increase credibility, attract more clients, and communicate with the outside world. However, the work doesn’t end with launching your site online. In fact, that’s where much of it begins in the form of website maintenance.
If you want to learn more about what website maintenance entails, in this article, we show you everything you need to pay attention to to properly care for your site after launch.
What is Part of Website Maintenance?
Here are the most important items on your website maintenance checklist.
Software Updates
Websites are nothing but pieces of software. Just like the operating system on your computer, they need to be kept up to date for security and performance reasons. In WordPress websites, this means regularly updating both the core software as well as any plugins and themes. When doing so, always perform a backup first. That way, if there’s a hiccup, you can roll back to a working site version.
Backups
Talking about backups, regularly saving copies of your site is also part of website maintenance. Imagine you lose your precious website, and there is no way of getting it back. The horror! Having an automatic backup solution in place will make this scenario much less adrenaline-heavy.
How often should you back up? That depends on your site. If you have an active blog, backing up daily can make sense. Sites that change less frequently can do with longer intervals.
Security
Anything connected to the Internet is exposed to at least some risk. Hackers and other shady individuals are always looking to compromise sites and use them for their own purposes.
For that reason, security is an important topic. Website maintenance not only involves setting up security measures from the start but also keeping an eye on their performance.
Speed
With mobile devices on the rise, site speed is an increasingly important topic (as is mobile design). A good website needs to load quickly so as not to alienate visitors.
However, over time websites accumulate data and can be slowly bogged down by that. To avoid this, regular clean ups and speed tests are mandatory.
Content Updates
Of course, part of maintaining a website is also keeping the content up to date. After all, you want to give your visitors the latest and most relevant information. If your contact information is faulty or your site still sporting ads for the Christmas sale in June, it will make you look unprofessional.
Search Engine Optimisation
Finally, you need to keep an eye on how your site fares regarding SEO. Tracking rankings, sniffing out broken links, analysing your webmaster tools, updating title tags, meta descriptions and other parts of on-page SEO are also part of successful website maintenance.
Could You Use Some Help?
Taking care of a website all by yourself sounds a bit overwhelming? Don’t worry; you don’t need to do it on your own (or at all for that matter). All maintenance tasks listed above are part of our website service. What’s more, we will even build the website, to begin with. If you are interested, learn more here or get in touch.
