6 Useful Tips for Website Maintenance that You Must Know
You are probably sabotaging your business if you’ve been neglecting your website maintenance. Today, websites have become the first medium of contact. Remember, the first impression is often the last. The implication is that it’s not enough to have a website with the best design and functionalities and ignore its maintenance.
Website maintenance has become a crucial key to customer retention, a primary avenue to attract new customers and clients. Your visitors will appreciate a fast, responsive and reliable website. To achieve this, you need to place a structure for regular maintenance, upgrades, and support.
You may not have realized, but it’s part of Google’s guideline that websites are regularly updated. Website maintenance is an important SEO element, a Google ranking factor. Here are six tips for running an up to date website;
1. Start By Reviewing Your Analytics
A crucial part of your website maintenance routine is the reviewing of your website’s statistics. But it does not end there; much more important is the editing of your website in line with the analytics available.
Often business owners pay little or no attention to their analytics, thereby neglecting the yearnings and wants of their customers.
Look through your analytics; you can have a clear picture of your visitors, traffic sources, and what they did. You will also be provided the keywords used in locating your website. With this, you can avoid curating content that no one reads.
2. Create Back-Ups of Your Website
With the increase in data breaches and cyberattacks, it has become crucial to create updated backups of your website. According to Identity Force, data breaches aren’t going anywhere soon. Through regular website maintenance, you can protect your business data and customer information.
According to data, 93% of businesses that suffered data loss for ten days or more are likely to file for bankruptcy within a year.
Schedule regular backup of your website and test if the backups work. Test your backups and be sure that they work, don’t wait until when an emergency occurs.
3. Update To The Latest Version of Your CMS
It’s part of website maintenance to look out for “a new version of WordPress is available.” This is not just about WordPress but every other content management system you use. Every CMS requires updates and upgrades to keep it running securely and smoothly. There’s no better idea than to update to the latest version of a CMS, as it often contains code fixes and security improvements.
However, please make it a routine to always create a backup of your website before upgrading the CMS. This is to provide your visitors with a safe and speedy user experience.
4. Check For Page Errors
As part of your website maintenance, you should look out for common website errors. These range from 500 internal server errors, 404 page not found, 400 bad requests, and 502 services temporarily overloaded. There are at least 15 common website page errors you should aim to fix during your website maintenance. These common website errors can make a mess of your business. What these errors do is piss off your visitors who leave in frustration. Aside from what it does to your visitors, your website will also be thrown off the Google first page as you’ll lose credibility. No two-way about it; you have to make it a habit to carry out a website audit.
5. Refresh and Repackage Your Content
Your content helps you to connect with your audience right from the first visit. That’s why you need to leave no stone unturned in curating content that converts visitors into customers. Start by looking through your existing contents; there will be those that have to be repurposed and repackaged.
Have it in mind that your content is the gateway to your potential customers. Therefore, never hit the publish button unless you are sure that the content will be of immense benefit to your target audience.
The ideal content is not about sounding salesy and promotional but providing beneficial information to your target audience.
6. Work on Your Website Speed
Your visitors only have 3 seconds to wait for your website to load. So the question is that can your website pass the 3 seconds test? It is proven that 1 in 4 visitors will close a browser tab if the website takes more than 4 seconds to load.
Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise that website speed does not matter. About $2.6 billion is also lost due to website speed annually. Look into your traffic source, hosting, images, page elements, and social sharing, one of these is usually the culprit.
If you fail to carry out regular maintenance, your website will lag, and you’ll lose potential customers. It would help if you looked deeper into what might be responsible for the slow loading speed of your website.
Final Thoughts
The summary of this is that a website is always a work in progress; it’ll always require improvements. By implication, your creativity and grit should have no end. It’s better not to have a website for one business than have one you don’t maintain.
Add website maintenance to your calendar. Do something to improve the functionalities at all times.