Keeping a fresh website is crucial to staying in business. Starting with User Experience. Don’t leave visitors wondering if this is an old website from a now defunct business. Or visitors have issues accessing your site because of old code. Lack of maintenance can effect Search Optimization. Most important, lack of maintenance creates security risks.
Website Maintenance is a critical part of owning a website. Websites need to change and that requires regular maintenance. Website maintenance consists of six areas that need attention on a regular basis. They are: Security, Content, Design, Technical SEO, Functionality and Performance. Whether you are trying to get this done on your own or looking to hire someone. Make sure your monthly activities include these items.
Security
There is no such thing as too much time spent on security. Security is about making sure your website is accessible to all. Visitors should not have to worry about the safety of their information or payment data. If you could only spend a small budget on maintenance, focus your spending on security.
Security checks should include:
- Protecting domain registrations.
- Keeping your hosting account clean. Clean from un-needed files and clean from malicious code.
- Keeping website software up-to-date.
- Making sure users who need to be on the website can get in and keeping those who should not.
- Regular backups of site files.
- Monitoring for outages, hacking and malware.
- Maintaining the security of your site should be a priority and a frequent activity. Security checks need to happen on a weekly basis at least.
Content
Website Maintenance should include regular content reviews. Not only to post what is missing, but to update information and take down content that is no longer valid.
Here are content checks to make on a regular basis:
- Take down past events.
- Search site for references to past events and delete or edit.
- Search site for reference to old dates. Delete or edit.
- Check page URLs for old dates.
- Check SEO data for old dates (Titles and Descriptions).
- Update list of services or products.
- Check prices.
- Review blogs or articles. Are they still relevant? Delete if the info no long applies.
Items like Events and Prices need frequent checks, like on a monthly basis. You could do the other checks annually. This will depend on the site and how often the business changes. Annual checks may not be enough.
Design
Maintenance will help lengthen the life of your design. If you are happy with the design, doesn’t need to change a lot. Making regular updates will keep your design looking fresh. Even as website trends change.
Maintenance of your web design should include:
- Checking pages for consistent styling. Make sure the design you picked is still used on all pages.
- Review against your branding standards. When a user goes to any page on your site, it should look like it belongs on your site.
- Browser Compatibility. Do your pages still look good in all web browsers? They all have different script that can change the display of your pages. You may need to add styling for each.
- User Experience Testing. If your site is having trouble converting leads, consider testing your design. Regularly setup eye tracking studies and gather ongoing data on page performance.
- Accessibility. Review your site against accessibility guidelines. Ensure your site is accessible to users with disabilities.
Design maintenance might be more of a project then a routine check. I would take each of these bullet items and schedule on the calendar a time to go through the entire site once per year.
Technical SEO
The goal of Technical SEO is to make sure that Google’s spiders can access the pages of your website. That is what they refer to as “crawl-able”. If Google cannot physically visit your webpages, forget SEO.
Routine maintenance for Technical SEO should include:
- Speed Tests
- Core Vitals Scores
- 404 Errors or Broken Links
- Crawl Error reports (Google Search Console)
- Missing meta data (Titles and descriptions)
- Schema data – adding and updating (many have dates associated with them)
As part of our SEO Practice, we also run a monthly SEO Audit to pick up any information missing. Or best practices not followed. Many of these checks can be done on a monthly basis to keep up with needed updates.
Function
Function is about making sure your website works. Fixing broken things. You will notice that the longer you delay maintenance, more time is needed to fix broken things. Visitors coming to a broken site won’t hang out long. They definitely won’t become a lead. Try to catch problems as early as you can.
Check your website for the following issues:
- Error messages
- Pages that won’t load
- Test in pages in different browsers – they each load your site differently.
- Pages that load slowly
- Images that won’t load or load slowly
- Test forms – make sure they work and you get the submissions from them.
- Test Logins – If your users login to your site, is it working?
- Checkout – make sure users can complete a sale
Schedule these checks at least on a monthly basis. Or try to check key pages monthly and schedule a full site check quarterly or annually.
Performance
Website maintenance is not about only fixing broken things. It should also be about making improvements. I would also add checking on performance to make sure improvements happen. Start with identifying website statistics to review. Based on trends over time, plan a project to improve numbers.
There are many areas of website performance to focus on. If resources are tight, focus on the performance of the areas of your site that are key to your business. Ask your team, what does the website need to do? Is it living up to expectations? Based on the answer pick an area of focus.
Areas of performance to look at would be:
- Speed
- User Experience
- Organic search
- Content Performance
- Lead Generation or Conversion
Improvements to performance will likely be weekly or monthly activities. Include quarterly checks of website metrics or analytics to track progress.
More Website Maintenance?
To learn more about website maintenance, listen to the broadcast of our webinar. Website Maintenance: Do I Really Need it?
A little overwhelmed? Cybervise has many levels of Maintenance Plans to fit your business and your website.
