Why Regular Maintenance is Important For Your Website
In our everyday life we’re taught to always keep up our maintenance for the things that are important in our daily lives. Oil changes, visits to the doctor and dentist are all parts of the maintenance we do to keep our cars and bodies healthy and running properly. However, as business owners it’s also important to keep your website up to date and running properly. Your website is an investment and it’s important to make sure it runs smoothly and everything is up to date. Don’t know where to start? No problem, we’ve provided an easy guide to make sure your website stays in top shape.
- Backup Your Website It’s important to make sure you have backups of your websites and all of your data. That way if the server crashes or your site gets hacked, you can restore it to a previously working version. If you aren’t currently backing your site up or don’t have access, reach out to your web developer or hosting provider to inquire as to what kind of backups they are providing and how often backups are generated.
- Security Updates Making sure your software is up to date and all upgrades, bug fixes and security patches are installed is a vital part of website maintenance. In WordPress out of date plugins can leave you exposed to security flaws that will leave you open to Malware attacks and hacks.
- Update Copyright Notices Be sure to review and change any copyright information and date specific text or references throughout your site. This is especially important on the front page of your website.
- Check Contact Forms and Contact Information Periodically you should check all contact forms on your site and ensure that they are all working and that they direct the mail to a proper email address. Also go through and check all phone numbers and social media links to make sure all information is up to date.
- Review Legal Disclaimers It’s important to review your privacy policy, site terms and conditions of use, terms of sale and any disclaimers to ensure your site is compliant to any applicable policies and laws.
- Browser Compatibility Testing Over time website layouts or software may become incompatible with new website browsers. Therefore you should regularly review and test your website in various version of mainstream browsers such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and Microsoft Internet Explorer.
- Test Your Checkout Process If you have an online store, it’s really important to check the purchase, checkout process. Not only to make sure it works but also to make sure your customers are having the smoothest, easiest check out possible. Failure to do so can greatly affect sales from your website.
- Perform Accessibility Tests It’s highly important to make sure your site is in compliance with the ADA or Americans with Disabilities Act.
- Review Website Content and Links Periodically you should go through your website and search carefully for broken links, features that don’t work due to software updates and other areas that could use improvement. Attention should be given to over user experience, ease of use, load time, outdated content, inconsistent styles or formatting and typos.
- Review your SEO Once per month you should check your Google Analytics in order to gauge your website’s effectiveness. It’s important to set and measure KPIs or Key Performance Indicators, check search engine ratings and general website analytics. This will help your determine the effectiveness of your website and expose possible problems. Also at least once per year you should review all of your meta data such as keywords, titles, descriptions and other meta tags. If you aren’t familiar with Meta Data and other SEO terms, reach out to your web developer and request an SEO review. This will ensure that your site continues to rank well and that your potential clients can find you.