Regular Website Maintenance

Your Guide to Regular Website Maintenance

All websites need regular maintenance to ensure that they will remain secure and operational. Websites aren’t a built once and done proposition. Just like if you build a bricks and mortar store you must keep the place looking clean, and all the locks and security in good repair, the same goes for your website if you want it to maximize performance. Here’s a brief guide to regular website maintenance.

1) Quality Control

Your website should be monitored on a regular basis for errors on the site in terms of grammar, typos, misspellings, and broken links. If people visit your site and notice too many errors, they will lose trust in your work. This goes for all copy on your site as well as ads that you place on your website. It’s all-important since it’s on your site and represents you.

2) Communication Management

Your website is the first line of communication with your audience, and if the methods of communication you offer aren’t working properly your customer service will suffer. Regularly test your customer service system, help desk, and contact forms to ensure that they work.

3) Performance Standards

How fast do you want your site to load? Is it maintaining your standard? How well do your landing pages convert? How does your site work on mobile technology? Someone needs to establish a standard and then monitor to ensure compliance.

4) Infrastructure Monitoring

All websites must be updated in terms of security on both the website and the hosting. It’s important that someone is monitoring how well your hosting is working because without that, you have no website.

5) Publishing Administration

Part of having a working website is having an easy to accomplish publishing process that keeps content up to date and consistent. You may need writers, editors and those who format and publish the content for live viewing on your site. This needs to be done regularly. By most standards you need at least 10 to 20 new pieces of content like blog posts per month.

6) Security Monitoring and Updating

Hackers are out there waiting to find a way into your website so they can either redirect your visitors, hide links, install malware or worse. It’s important that you use software and/or a service to continuously monitor the security of your website.

7) Structural Updates

Every site will need periodic updates in terms of the structure of the site, including ensuring that menus, widgets, advertising, and things like shopping carts are always working properly to help you have the highest return on investment.

8) Continuous Backups

All websites should be backed up continuously. Many hosting companies offer automatic daily backups, but you should also invest in a software program or a service to back up your website on a continuous basis off site.

How many staff you need to accomplish these tasks depends on the size of your business. If you are not very tech savvy you definitely want to outsource the most important security and backup tasks and website design tasks to someone else while you handle the content management and publishing process. You’ll be glad you did because regular website maintenance is crucial to having a successful income-producing website.


A Message from Norma...

In case you're curious, I started working online in 1997 - in the dinosaur days of the internet. My purpose here at HomeFreeMedia is to help YOU build the business of your dreams by developing and recommending top quality products and tools. This will also result in profit and affiliate commissions for me, so we both win!
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