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Website Maintenance: An Introduction
If you’ve had a website built, you’re going to need website maintenance. Contrary to what most think, website maintenance doesn’t just refer to bug fixes and patches.
Instead, the term encompasses all the continuous processes that make a website great, like checking for errors, updating content, improving security, and countless other things.
Below, we will talk about all the different reasons website maintenance is a requirement for business websites and take a small look at what it can do for you.
Before that, though, here’s a deeper look into the topic so you can get a taste of what you’re signing up for:
What is Website Maintenance? Exploring the Processes That Go into Website Maintenance
The Whats, Hows, and Whys of Website Maintenance. Creating a visually attractive, streamlined, and efficient website is a challenge, but it’s only half the battle today.
The rest of the battle is keeping it working, up-to-date, and functional- all things that you can only achieve through a process of constant website maintenance.
The question, then, is what is website maintenance? In simple words, website maintenance is the practice of monitoring the health of your website.
The number of tasks included in the term is many, but it essentially boils down to keeping your pages up-to-date and error-free.
That means updating your security software for improved data security, adding new plugins for better performance as time passes, increasing traffic through SEO practices, et cetera.
What Comes Under Website Maintenance?
Website maintenance is an umbrella term that encompasses a lot of tasks. If you want to keep your sanity by the second week, we have an excellent tip for you:
Separate them into different groups based on how often they need to be done.
For example, rewriting website content helps you rank higher on Google searches, but rewriting every blog every week is impossible. That’s a monthly task.
On the other hand, you need to keep up with weekly metrics and how changes you’ve made affect your website traffic. Using Google Analytics to check your metrics is a weekly task.
To help you plan out your website maintenance schedule, we’ve outlined some of the most critical components of the process down below. : Website maintenance is an umbrella term that encompasses a lot of tasks. If you want to keep your sanity by the second week, we have an excellent tip for you:
Separate them into different groups based on how often they need to be done.
For example, rewriting website content helps you rank higher on Google searches, but rewriting every blog every week is impossible. That’s a monthly task.
On the other hand, you need to keep up with weekly metrics and how changes you’ve made affect your website traffic. Using Google Analytics to check your metrics is a weekly task.
To help you plan out your website maintenance schedule, we’ve outlined some of the most critical components of the process down below. :
1. Keeping Up With Your Metrics
Out of all the things you’re going to be doing, none will be as important as keeping up with the latest data on your website.
If you haven’t guessed it already, it’s impossible to update your website for the better without knowing how particular changes are affecting incoming traffic.
Are people spending more time on each page after you changed the font?
Or maybe people are spending less time on that new landing page you added last week?
You can use knowledge like that to get to know your audience better and get a feel for their tastes and preferences. So do this often: at least once or twice a week!
2. Check How Fast Your Website Is
You’ll find tools online for doing almost everything, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that there’s a tool for checking how fast your website is.
In fact, there are many.
Choose one you’re comfortable using and check how fast your website is. Most of them also generate insights about speeding up loading times, like getting rid of high-resolution images and using more simplistic themes.
3. Backing Up Your Website
If you don’t know how to code a website yourself, chances are you hired a developer to do it for you.
We don’t have to tell you they don’t come cheap.
That’s a lot of money you poured into your website right there. Guess what happens if the service you’re hosting your site on experiences a crash and loses its data?
That’s right, all that money goes down the drain. If you don’t want to end up bankrupt every time there’s a server crash, do the smart thing and back up your website on an external device.
About once a week usually works, provided you’re putting out new content no more than three to four times a week.
4. Reviewing and Updating Content Based on SEO
Search Engine Optimization, also called SEO, uses new practices to make your website rank higher on Google searches.
The premise of SEO is simple: nobody scrolls too far for Google searches. The higher your website ranks, the more traffic it’s going to get.
Organic traffic, backlinks to trustworthy sites, engagement, and other metrics let you understand what content works and what doesn’t. To make sure you’re always making the most out of your website, review and update your content often.
However, this is a very time-consuming process, so once a month should be alright if your website isn’t bleeding traffic.
Why Should I Invest in Website Maintenance? The Benefits of Website Maintenance
If you’re impatient to know why you should be investing both time and money into continuous website maintenance, you’ll be glad to know here that we’re wasting no time.
Instead, we’re diving right into the topic.
Here are our picks for the top 5 reasons website maintenance is essential:
● You Improve Site Security
Today, one of the biggest worries users have when providing their data to websites is security.
Nobody wants to give out their email to a website with frequent data breaches, and for a good reason too.
Frequent website maintenance like installing updates to its framework and using secure data storage sites improves your website security. It assures users their data is safe with you.
● Optimizing Your Website’s UX
UX means User Experience and is an umbrella term standing for users’ overall experience when interacting with your website.
Like you might expect, having a website with a smooth and streamlined UX is a big part of what makes a business website successful.
Website maintenance practices like updating your content, sharing info about upcoming events, adding pictures to pages, and adding blogs improve your UX and engage your audience.
Here’s a tip from us: while doing all of that, make sure you also remove out-of-date info. Search engines frown on websites that provide out-of-date or incorrect info.
● It Boosts Your Site Traffic
This might be the one point that doesn’t need anything said because, at the end of the day, boosting traffic to your site is what it’s all about. The more people visiting your site, the more potential customers you have.
As for how you’re going to do that, there are several ways, like:
- Providing the best quality content,
- Adding links to trustworthy sites and fixing broken links,
- Keeping your content up-to-date, and
- Use relevant keywords to rank your pages higher on search engines.
Maintaining Your Business Website: A Conclusion
When you’re starting out with your website, maintenance might not be at the top of your priority list. Take it from us, though: It should be.
Website maintenance will help keep your website up-to-date, high-ranking on search engine searches, and have the appeal you need to engage your visitors. Here’s a final tip to end this: Don’t forget the data backups. Please.
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