Website Maintenance Checklist: The to-do’s

Website maintenance is the process by which you do regular checks on your website to ensure that it runs well on any browser and is secure enough for the traffic of web users visiting it daily. Depending on the task, there are things that can be done on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis to make sure that your website performs well. Business and e-commerce platforms have taken their stores onto the web to appeal to a larger market of clients. It is because of the shift in how we do business online, that regular maintenance for your website is needed and should be performed by competent web designers. Given below is a comprehensive checklist on how to maintain your websites:

Monthly maintenance

  • Speed of your website: The web traffic to your site is largely impacted by how fast your website takes to load. There are many free online tools such as GTmetrixs, that help you establish how fast your site takes to load by tracking your websites performance over time. Further, a detailed assessment on how to optimize your website is also provided as part of its service. Thanks to social media, customers these days are very vocal online when websites are slow. Additionally, they are less likely to come back to your site if the speed issue is not fixed.
  • Security checks: Website security is crucial to detect any security vulnerabilities in your websites. Some of the most common vulnerabilities include cross site scripting/browser sink attacks, vulnerable components and weak authentication due to weak passwords and other error related issues. Some online tools can help you detect these potential risks as well as protect you from them. They are able to work across the multiple website platforms such as WordPress, etc.
  • Improve SEO traffic: The content on your website must be updated regularly in order to increase your SEO ranking. For this to happen, you must focus on the business you are trying to bring in and target this audience by using multiple relevant keywords. Your website’s relevancy depends on how often you update your content. Other ways in directing traffic to your site is by using alt tags to describe your videos and images, descriptive links and by updating the metadata on your site.

Quarterly Maintenance

  • Improvements to your website: As part of your quarterly website maintenance checklist, a careful review of your pages is needed. Ensure that the information or content on your website is original and accurate. Perhaps you can update and improve the pictures and images placed on your site. Small updates to the website content can also be done. Check on the overall user experience and fix any broken links. If you have an e-commerce website, extra care must be taken regarding the checkout process and call-to-actions.
  • Back up site data: Your site is a repository of information and data. Making sure you back up this data is essential depending on how often you make changes to your site. This data can be useful when you need to redesign certain pages within your website. There are many options for backing up data that is available to you. A manual back up is the most convenient method by which you manually FTPing your files to your local PC. Another method for backup is a cPanel backup. The most commonly used backup today is storing your information on the cloud. WordPress developers use Dropbox as a suitable backup tool.
  • Accessibility by different browsers: To make sure your site can be accessible to potential customers all over the world, it is important to test if your website can be opened on all types of browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge etc. The compatibility of your site with these browsers is dependent on the design of your site. There are online tools that help you run simulations of how your websites could respond on different browsers. Web developers can do this testing for you as part of their quarterly maintenance checklist.

Annual Maintenance

  • Redesign your website: To keep things fresh and exciting, a redesign of your website can invite new traffic and increase business. Depending on your goals and budget, the redesign can be either small or extensive. To stay relevant in a hyper-competitive industry, a website design can help boost sales and put you ahead of the competition. Changing certain things such as advertising strategies or updating your content to include new and exciting products, can change how your site could look to potential new customers. Redesign becomes easier if you know what customers focus on mainly from your old website. Google Analytics helps in determining the type of traffic you receive. Using a sitemap to your old website can help you create a new one for the redesigned site. Extra care must also be given to driving more traffic towards the new website. This includes optimizing the site to further improve SEO.
  • Update your content: Content on your website must be updated regularly to make information that is on your website accurate and relevant. Creating new content and adding a lot of visual and attractive infographics can help boost website traffic. Visuals and animations are something that need to be updated very often to stay relevant. The presence of blogs helps increase traffic to your site and is a critical marketing technique for your website. The quality of writing on your blog must be of high-quality to ensure the SEO value is high for your site.
Virtual web designers and developers for hire

There are many virtual web professionals that you can hire to design and perform maintenance activities for your website. Hiring web designers from India is a cost-effective solution for your website design needs. Most virtual staffing agencies offer skilled graphic designers that will help to make your websites user-friendly and provide customers with a seamless online experience. Many of these professionals work across various platforms to deliver creative solutions that can match the goals and budget of your business.

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