What Is Website Maintenance?
Website maintenance is the process of constantly checking your website for problems and errors and keeping it up to date. This should be done consistently to keep your website healthy, promote continuous traffic growth, and strengthen your SEO and Google rankings.
Keeping the website well maintained and attractive is important for large and small companies to engage and retain customers. Businesses, especially startups, find it easy to cut corners and slide some tasks.
Website maintenance can easily turn into one of those things because it does not always present immediate problems.
However, if left unchecked for a long time without regular testing, how can your health deteriorate, as well as the health of your website.
You need to constantly monitor your website for your business to run smoothly.
What Are the Steps in Website Maintenance? A Quick Checklist
There is a laundry list of tasks that need to be done to keep your website running smoothly. The most sensitive of these are cyber security updates and links. Without these, there is the potential for real danger to those who click on your website.
With that in mind, here is a list of web maintenance tasks that must be completed:
To be done weekly
- Make sure all your pages are loaded without errors
- Run the backup and make sure that the previous version of your site is saved
- Create updates for web software and plug-ins
- Check that all your forms are working properly
- Remove spam comments from pages and posts
- Check your pages to see if there are any broken links
- Find and fix 404 errors or redirect
- Write one or more blog posts to keep your community engaged and promote SEO traffic.
To be done monthly
- Check the optimal speed of your website and make sure nothing is stuck in it
- Review your security scans and make sure nothing is in the right place
- Analyze the previous month’s website statistics
- Check your blog to see if any articles can be updated
To be done quarterly
- Review your website design and structure – can it be improved?
- Check graphics and images – Need something updated?
- Review SEO and meta titles and descriptions to make sure they are as useful as possible
- Check and change popups, forms, and calls to action
- Review your workload for performance and see if anything can be automated
- Check on all devices and browsers to see if your website is displayed properly
- Review advertising and marketing campaigns to see if anything needs to be changed or updated.
- To check the health of your backup, restore the previous version of the website
To be done yearly
- Update any note for the current year
- Review each page for content accuracy, grammar, spelling errors, and relevance
- Check the active email addresses and see if there are any more and can delete them
- Make sure your website domain name is up to date
- See if the web design update is coming
- Review all of your best-performing blog articles and see if you can update them with new content.
The perfect web maintenance plan is a circle
As you can see from our checklist, website maintenance should be a regular part of your business. It grows on itself, and if not correctly implemented, can cause some serious problems and setbacks to your potential growth and business health.
Staying on top of website health takes awareness and organization. This is particularly the case for a large site with hundreds (or even thousands) of pages.
With the introduction of new tools to make website building easier, website sizes are growing each year. While it’s easy to add pages to most websites, it’s not as easy to keep all of your pages in a good state.
All that to say: keep on top of your website maintenance.
Why Is It Important to Do Website Maintenance?
Many new businesses already have a lot on their trays without worrying about constantly checking in on their website. It’s tempting to buy a domain name, throw something away temporarily, and then worry about it. There are many reasons why this is not a good idea. Maintaining a current, healthy and active website is important for many reasons.
SEO
The whole point of starting a business is to have customers, clients, or an audience. To drive traffic to your website, you’ll need to keep it regularly updated.
Google wants to rank websites that have the most relevant and up-to-date information on their search engine results page. If your website has not been updated enough recently and they suspect it has been infected with malware, they can de-index it completely. To get the best place in search results, you need to constantly update your website with current content, news, keywords, and articles.
Regular website maintenance is invaluable to the SEO strategy.
Customer Attraction/Engagement
If your website is gaining traction and traffic, it’s important to keep those potential customers. If they aren’t able to find what they are looking for, current information, and relevant content, there is a good chance you’ll lose interest quickly. For your website to be the useful tool you want, you’ll need to ensure it is free from typos and grammar issues, has any information a customer could want, and looks engaging and consistent.
Security
This is the most important reason to keep website maintenance on your radar. If you use a website development site such as WordPress or Wix, you need to make sure you are installing regular software updates and security links. It can be easy and attractive for hackers to detect and target websites that have been inactive for a long time.
Corporate Image
Creating a well-designed and professional-looking website is becoming more and more simple. There is an expectation for a professional website from professional companies. If your website does not provide a professional guarantee, your customers will often go elsewhere.
Your Sanity
Your website is the most important part of your business. If it is up to date and running smoothly, it will be a valuable support and asset. If it is not in good condition, it may cost you more. If you’re lagging in your maintenance needs, getting the website back up to speed can be quite a process.
Follow the trends of design and technology
The more elegant your website is, the more likely you are to believe that customers are the ultimate choice. If you continue to maintain your website, you will also have the opportunity to become a forerunner of new web technology that will help you run the post-end more smoothly. If you install software updates regularly, you can take advantage of new features that install with updates.
How Much Does Website Maintenance Cost?
Different cost expectations are depending on what your website is used for, the size of your audience, and how much content is hosted. Below we discussed the different price brackets.
Small personal blog
A small blog usually does not have much traffic and has very low requirements. You can host it at no cost on a blogging site like Google Blogger. Alternatively, the domain name can be renewed and self-hosted using a site such as WordPress with minimal monthly costs generated from the hosting service.
Medium-to-large active blog with a wide audience
If you have a blog that generates revenue with an active audience, you will want to self-host with some customizations. This will require frequent maintenance, updates, marketing and backups, and slightly larger cash investment.
Company website for marketing purpose only
Like a medium-sized blog, it should be self-hosted with a simple design template and limited content. It will be less maintenance to maintain with regular updates, marketing, and backups.
Great personalized eCommerce websites
This can be a huge financial investment as you need to be aware of web maintenance.
You handle a lot of content, code customization, and customer data. If you do not have an IT team, we recommend finding a web maintenance package to suit your website needs.
Custom configured web application
This will be your biggest financial investment. Your web application is customized from the ground up for a specific purpose and it should always be in the best working condition or your company will be affected. This will require a dedicated staff of developers.
FAQs
What is a website maintenance plan?
Website maintenance plan is exactly what it looks like: a current plan to maintain and support your website. It requires more in-depth work than most people spend time on or know how to do well, so they turn to outside digital marketing agencies or vendors to maintain their website.
What is included in website support?
Website support requires a large range of services, focusing on its general development rather than focusing on one aspect of the project. Examples include content management, technical monitoring, Internet advertising, advertising, and “first aid” if a website needs immediate repair.
Why do websites need maintenance?
Constantly updating and maintaining your site is important to ensure that your site is running at full capacity. Like cars, websites require maintenance to function properly. Proper maintenance of your site helps to ensure the security of the site, increase the number of new visitors, increase return traffic, and much more.
