What Exactly Is Website Upkeep?
Your company website needs regular maintenance, just like your home does. Website maintenance is regularly checking in on your website to ensure everything is functioning as it should.
Regularly maintaining your website reduces the possibility of downtime, keeps it running quickly, stops broken links from piling up, and offers a variety of additional advantages that we’ll go over in a moment.
Website maintenance ensures that leads and consumers visiting your site have a pleasant, quick, and intuitive experience, which motivates them to sign up, buy, and return later.
Tools & Knowledge Required for Website Maintenance
Let’s briefly go over some of the tools and skills you need to maintain your website in top condition before we break down exactly what tasks you need to add to your website maintenance plan.
Website Upkeep Expertise
The following abilities are necessary to keep up with your website maintenance plan:
- an understanding of current SEO best practices.
- A sense of style.
- knowing about website security assaults and how to avoid them
Tools for Website Maintenance
In addition, you will require access to and proficiency with some of the following tools:
- tool for scaling images (e.g., Tiny JPG)
- web analytics programme (e.g. Google Analytics, Ahrefs, Moz Pro)
- enhancing tool for content (e.g., SurferSEO, Siteliner)
- Your website’s content management system (e.g., WordPress, Squarespace, Wix)
- cPanel of your website (provided by your web hosting provider)
The Fannie marketing blog has dozens of useful tutorials that refresh your memory on the abilities mentioned above and tools and other internet marketing advice, so don’t worry if you feel a little rusty on them.
What exactly does website maintenance entail?
The smooth operation of your website depends on coordinating numerous aspects. Navigation, content, plugin updates, branding, sales funnels, loading times, backlinks, graphic design, security upgrades, and more are all included in this. As a result, maintaining and designing high-quality websites requires a long list of tasks.
Even though this may initially seem daunting, don’t panic; depending on how frequently you need to complete each task, you can divide them into smaller, more manageable chunks.
Tasks for Weekly Website Maintenance
- Every week, check your website’s dashboard for updates or error notifications. Make sure to authorize software and plugin upgrades. Functionality and security problems may emerge from failure to do so (especially for WordPress sites).
- Check the speed and accuracy of all the pages on your website with a page-loading tool. GT Metrix, WebPagetest, and Google Search Engine Console are available as tools.
- Check each form on your website to ensure it’s functioning properly.
- Your website should be backed up, and the backup should be kept securely. Using a plugin like UpdraftPlus, this step may frequently be automated.
- Remove any spam comments. Using a plugin like Akismet, this can be automated.
- To make sure your site is free of 404 errors, use a program like Screaming Frog. Correct any you find or reroute to prevent users from becoming lost on your site.
- Look for any broken links in the site’s navigation. A tool like Ahref’s Free Broken Link Checker makes this fast work.
- We also urge you to post at least one blog entry to your website each week. By consistently updating your blog, you may increase the number of keywords your site ranks for, increase your organic traffic, and position your business as an authority in your field.
Monthly Website Upkeep Tasks
- Look for optimization chances by examining your company website’s performance data from the previous month. You can produce statistics and data visualizations using programs like Google Analytics and Ahrefs.
- Using a program like GT Metrix, check the overall website’s load time. Read through the Top Issues report produced by GT Metrix. If your site’s loading performance suffers, click “Learn how to improve this” to fix the problem.
- Your website’s content should be reviewed with a program like SurferSEO to look for SEO optimizations because your blog posts and webpages aren’t evergreens regarding SEO best practices.
- Analyze the security scans your security app produces (e.g., Wordfence). A website security expert should be contacted if something seems strange or out of the ordinary.
Tasks for Site Maintenance Every Quarter
- Examine your website’s forms, popups, and CTAs, and optimize and conduct A/B testing for enhancement.
- Test its responsive design to guarantee that your website looks fantastic and functions well across all devices.
- Every three months, you should analyze your website’s architecture and search for areas for optimization.
- It’s a good idea to check your site’s meta descriptions and titles to ensure they comply with current SEO best practices and are both effective.
- To ensure your site’s overall SEO is current, you should perform a website audit every three months. You may achieve this using Ahrefs and two tools.
- While at it, evaluate your whole SEO approach and internet marketing strategy to determine if anything needs to be updated or changed.
annual tasks for maintaining websites
- Search your website on January 1 for any mentions of the previous year and change them to the current year. For instance, change the blog post title “Best Lawnmowing Tips for 2020” to “Best Lawnmowing Tips for 2021.”
- Check to see if your website’s domain name has been renewed and that the payment information for any paid plugins is up to date.
- To find out which blog articles and pages are bringing in the most visitors to your website, use a service like Ahrefs. To make sure they continue to operate properly, be sure to update these pieces of content.
- Similarly, identify which blog posts aren’t ranking and update them to comply with modern best practices by running them through an SEO tool like SurferSEO. Your web presence will increase as a result of this.
- Last but not least, have a meeting with your website design team at least once a year to discuss potential upgrades to the branding and layout of your site. Your website must appear new, up-to-date, and thoughtful about its user experience if you want it to convert leads.
What Justifies the Need for Website Upkeep?
You might ask, “Is website upkeep even relevant at this point?” And we can see where you’re coming from; properly maintaining a site takes a lot of time and work, and training is also necessary if you don’t know how to do it. The amount of work required to maintain a website can deter many people, but we strongly advise against doing so.
More than just a beautiful and functional website is delivered by regular upkeep. Additionally, it increases sales, ensures your safety and the safety of your clients, and aids in getting your business listed on Google’s first page.
Let’s go through some of the advantages of site maintenance in greater detail so you can see why it is so important for your company’s success.
Gains from SEO
A staggering 71 percent of all search traffic to the internet, which is growing every year as more people use it to find goods and services, lands on Google’s first page. A site that ranks top on Google receives ten times as many clicks as a site that is last on the first page.
All of this suggests that in 2021, it will be essential to your company’s success to have your site on the front page of Google the top spot as you can.
To accomplish this, maintaining your web pages regularly guarantees that you stay current with the most recent SEO best practices and raises the likelihood that your site will appear on Google’s front page.
converting leads
Maintaining your website regularly not only increases organic traffic to your website but also keeps your web pages from ever appearing antiquated. A well-maintained website inspires confidence and encourages visitors to review your offerings, submit contact forms, and subscribe to email lists.
Rewards of Website Security
Maintaining your web pages regularly also helps you remain on top of software changes, security updates, and other maintenance duties that support your health and security.
Hackers might easily steal your data and your clients’ data if you leave your web pages unpatched and without the latest plugins. You may reduce these security worries by ensuring SSL certificates are operating correctly, and other security procedures are maintained.
Brand Image
Your brand’s reputation increases together with your business. By removing broken links, slow loading times, and badly written content, routine maintenance helps preserve your brand image and keep your branding consistent.
Maintains Your Competitive Edge
Keep your site up to date and functioning properly to win over Google’s favor, improve your rankings, and rise above the competition in the search results (SERPs). You’ll also realize that many of your rivals are careless in this area as you develop the practice of maintaining your website. As a result, your web pages will convey a better level of professionalism than the shoddy ones run by competitors, giving you a competitive advantage.
Availability of funds
Costly consequences may arise from neglecting to manage your website, resulting from expensive emergency website repairs or security breaches. You can avoid these financial risks by putting money into your site’s health and adhering to a web maintenance plan.