What is website maintenance?
Maintenance of a website can be described as keeping the website up-to-date in terms of programming, content, and information. It also involves monitoring and resolving technical glitches related to a website.
Website maintenance is a process that you have to follow if ever you want your website to be updated with the latest information, security updates, bug fixes, and whatnot. Failure to do so can cause loss of vital information provided by your website or even hacking attempt by malicious individuals.
Why you should give priority to website maintenance
The main purpose for which you have created or developed your own site is to make it available for users preferably 24/7. Remember when people come across your online property they have certain expectations from it. In case there are any shortcomings on this front, dissatisfaction among visitors is bound to result along with a loss of their interest in future dealings with your business or organization. So good that you committed yourself at the time of making the venture possible by getting a professional programmer or web developer to build your website and for this reason you should give priority to ensuring that they have done a proper job.
By using this checklist for maintaining your website (or blog), it would be easier to do these tasks without forgetting one of them. Performing all tasks mentioned above would give your site’s visitors the best experience that they could possibly get from visiting your site.
1. Examine and test the entire website
Since the internet is an ever-changing medium, all websites undergo natural wear and tear with the passage of time. Sites need regular updating as per recent trends, software upgrades, or technology changes. Visuals like pictures and logos possibly changing over time also require updating. For all such reasons, it becomes essential to monitor your site on a regular basis for required modifications, corrections, or updates. It is only through a thorough examination of your entire website that these glitches can be identified and their consequences prevented from causing damage further down the line.
This means checking every single page on the internet (and locally) of course if ever there are changes in code like broken links, missing images, or such.
2. Fix broken links
This means checking (and fixing if necessary) all the URLs on your website to make sure that they are working properly. And of course, it would be better if you place no broken link images so your site’s viewers won’t have to wait for the link’s destination to load.
There are several factors that can result in broken links to content on your site. These include outdated HTML code, old redirects, incorrect URLs, or incorrect link text. Regardless of the cause for this problem, it is important that you make every effort to correct them as quickly as possible because they not only look bad but also lead visitors to other websites thereby weakening your online presence rather than strengthening it.
3. Eliminate Links to Unsafe Domains
When you identify that there are links to external sites that do not fall within acceptable parameters then you should eliminate them at once because users rarely ever visit random addresses and therefore could be dissuaded from exploring your website further if they find any such offers pasted on your site.
Unsafe domains means those which may contain malware or spam-related content. So by eliminating these kinds of domain names can help protect visitors from getting dangerous PC infections just by visiting your site.
4. Make Full Website Backups
It is always essential to keep backups of your entire website or blog especially when you have new pages/posts you made, this way if ever your site got hacked or something you can easily restore its previous state.
Making a backup of your website is a simple yet effective way to save your data and protect yourself from potential losses that you might have otherwise incurred. In order to safeguard against hardware failures, software bugs, or programming errors it is important for you to make full website backups on a regular basis so that they can be utilized in case there are any problems with the original site files.
5. Boost Readability
Fixing coding errors and reviewing overall typography can also do a lot of good for your website’s readability. This way, people will spend more time browsing through your content which ultimately will improve overall site ranking as well. A great solution for WordPress users is the WP-Edit plugin which allows its users to edit themes directly within the admin dashboard itself without messing with code.
Recommendations for fresh content on your site are also important to follow because there might be different strategies required to make your website stand out from the crowd in crowded online marketplaces. Running a blog can help you with this task easier because it will boost up user interest in your site and they will return more often which is not possible when you are using static pages only. So, it is advised to use the WordPress platform if you want to run a blog on your website efficiently.
Eliminating grammar mistakes and typos create a negative impression about the quality of any product or service so it’s better to avoid these things at all costs. You can buy ready-made articles from websites like iWriter or Contentmart so that you do not have to create your own content. You will probably need to outsource this task if you want to avoid all these issues which is also not a bad idea in the end because you can cut costs at the same time.
6. Examine contact details
In all likelihood, you have included contact information such as email IDs, physical addresses, and phone numbers at several places including sitemaps, footers, headers, etc. Therefore it becomes necessary for you to check whether these points remain unchanged or not because wrong or outdated details can produce undesirable results like failed communication, delayed response, and customer dissatisfaction.
This means checking email addresses, physical addresses, and phone numbers to ensure that it is working properly. Some of the spam emails sent nowadays contain dangerous programs so eliminating this kind of thing can reduce your risks of losing your private information.
7. Check for security updates and fix any bug
Checking regularly software patches or updates available can prevent hackers from trying to get access to your site/blog, also check regularly for any bugs as well since usually newly created programs have a lot of them.
8. Review and update legal disclaimers
Legal pages on your site may contain sensitive information that changes frequently. For this reason, it is important that you take the time to review them carefully so as to ensure the correctness of content because wrong or outdated details can result in unpleasant liabilities both for the concerned party as well as those associated with your organization. The last thing any sensible company needs is bad publicity!
Make sure every single legal disclaimer you put on your website is up to date, delete the old ones, and add newer disclaimers to prevent cases of copyright infringement.
Conclusion
Website maintenance is a lot like doing your job, you have to be present and work on it in order for everything to run smoothly, don’t make it hard for yourself by ignoring these basic things. Following this website maintenance checklist would help guarantee that your website’s contents are always up-to-date and free from malware or any other harmful viruses.
Author – Khurshid Alam is the founder of Pixel Street, a web design company. He aspires to solve business problems by communicating effectively digitally. In his leisure, he reads, writes, and occasionally plays a game of table tennis.