Yes, website maintenance is very important to any live website. Hence, ignoring it can bring a number of problems that can harm the website’s performance and reputation.
That’s why we always recommend my clients be cautious about their website maintenance right after launching the website.
Not only that, we’ve been maintaining almost all the websites we designed, even my first client’s website for a long time.
“The worry-free web maintenance service from IT Solutions Gippsland is one the best thing we admire all the time”, we got this feedback from Matthew Joseph Nandirio, an expert in the solar power industry who trusts us with his solar info web business.
So, in this article, I’m going to discuss the importance of web maintenance, a step-by-step guide to maintaining your website, and more importantly, I’m going to share my website maintenance checklist with you for FREE.
What is website maintenance?
Briefly, keeping a website functioning, safe, and optimized for both users and search engines is known as website maintenance.
- Updates to software and plugins
- Website backups
- Performance monitoring
- Security management
- Moderation of user-generated content
- Content optimization
Are some other main tasks which come under website maintenance.
What are the types of website maintenance?
Website maintenance can be categorised into a few. As a whole, all these types ensure the website remains functional, secure, and optimized for both users and search engines.
Technical Maintenance:
- Updating plugins
- Fixing broken links
- Ensuring that the website is compatible with different browsers and devices.
Content Maintenance:
- Updating the website with fresh and relevant content (blog posts, product descriptions, page content, etc.).
- Managing user-generated content (posts’ comments).
Design Maintenance:
- Updating the website’s design and layout to ensure it remains visually appealing and user-friendly.
- Updating images, videos, and other media.
- Making changes to the website’s colour palette and typography.
Security Maintenance:
- Taking steps to protect the website from security breaches. (monitoring for suspicious activities)
Performance Maintenance:
- Monitoring website performance, such as website speed, uptime, and traffic.
SEO Maintenance:
- Including relevant keywords and meta tags.
- Adding alt text, and captions for images.
- Keep track of analytics to check the performance of the website in search results.
Backup Maintenance:
- Performing frequent backups.
Why maintaining a website is important?
Ensures website functionality:
By frequent maintenance, you can identify and fix the broken links and outdated plugins which cause the website to malfunction. Therefore you can ensure that the website is accessible and easy to use for visitors.
Improve website security:
Security breaches are always a headache for web developers. However, since I’m monitoring and maintaining my clients’ websites frequently, I’m always at least one step before the hackers.
Regularly monitoring and updating the website, helps me to identify and fix the vulnerabilities soon. This helps to protect the websites and their users from security breaches.
Improves website performance
Search engines love websites that load fast.
Optimizing images and videos is one of the tasks in my website maintenance tasks list which helps the websites to load fast.
Increases search engine visibility
Websites have become one of the main marketing strategies for businesses. So, businesses always try to bring their website to first of the search results.
Frequently updating your website with fresh content, and the latest versions of plugins can help your website to rank higher in search engine results.
Protects your reputation
Your website is the first place where you showcase who you are. Therefore if your website content is outdated, users will think twice to choose your service. How will they guarantee your service if you’re not looking after your own website?
Saves cost in the long run
Frequent web maintenance keeps your website away from hackers and malfunctions. So, in the long run, you can save a lot of your costs.
What are the steps of technical maintenance of a website?
As I told you before, I’ve been developing as well maintaining websites for a quite long period now. Therefore I’ve fine-tuned my procedure to save my time as well as to maintain website without any website down.
Step 1: Back up the website
Making a copy of all the website’s files and data, including the content, photos, videos, and databases, is known as taking a backup of a website.
We can save this backup on a different server or cloud so that we can use it in the future.
Therefore, a backup of a website is a lifesaver when there is a server crash, hacking, or any unintentional deletion of the content on web pages. We can minimize the site’s downtime and guarantee that the website and its contents are safe.
Importance of Backup a Website Regularly
- Protection from data loss : All important data and files are safe with the backup.
- Minimizes Downtime : In case of any emergency, the restoration process can be done quickly.
- Peace of mind : Knowing that you important data and files are safe with the backup, you can work peace of mind.
- Compliance : The website owners who are handling sensitive information are bounded to take regular backup.
- Cost-effective : The cost of data loss can be much greater than the cost of regular backups.
- Versatile : Backups can be stored in multiple and convenient locations (in a separate server, cloud, etc.).
- Historical data : Backups include historical data. So, whenever you needed, you can retrieve it.
How to create and store backups
Manual backups
Creating the backup manually by using an FTP client to download the files to your local computer.
Automated backups
Using a backup plugin or a tool that automatically backup the website on a specific time period. There are both free and paid backup plugins.
Following is a list of tools you can use to create backups of your website
- UpdraftPlus
- BackWPup
- BackUpWordPress
- WP Time Capsule
- BackUpBuddy
- CodeGuard
- Duplicator Pro
- VaultPress
In my case, I’m using ManageWp, which comes for WordPress websites to manage all my websites. This tool has both paid and free features.
Well, this is not only a backup-taking tool. But in its features, we are given the option to schedule backups.
Following is the user interface for scheduling backups in ManageWP.
Cloud-based backups:
You can store your backups in a cloud-based storage service, such as Amazon S3, Google Drive, or Dropbox.
Server-based backups:
You can use a server to store your backup. I also use this method for some of my websites.
Website cloning:
You can create an exact copy of your websites on a separate domain or subdomain, So you can use this clone to do any tests prior to the live website. But if you are handling a number of websites, this is not an efficient method.
Backup to local storage:
You also can store the backups on your local computers.
Step 2: Updating plugins
After confirming that you have a recent backup of the website, now you can check for any plugin updates. If there are, you can update them.
When there is an up-to-date version of any plugin, Normally, I wait for a few days to check if everything goes well with the new update. If others are not complaining, I’ll update my website too.
Importance of keeping plugins up-to-date
- Updated versions of plugins always come with security patches. So, they improve your sites’ and users’ security.
- Ensures the website is compatible with the latest version of the website’s content management system (CMS) and other plugins.
- Improve the performance of the website by fixing bugs so that your site can rank in search results.
- The latest versions of plugins come with new features and options. So, you can use these to improve the quality of your websites.
How to check for and install updates
I’ll tell you two methods to check and install the updates for plugins using WordPress.
You can check the plugins tab in your website’s WordPress dashboard. I’ve added a screenshot below.
If any plugin needs to be updated, it will be marked in red as shown in the above image.
So, now you just have to click the update now button here.
Step 3: Monitoring website performance
Right after you completed updating the plugins you must check whether the website is working fine.
Because you can find out whether everything looks good after the update. In addition, you can also check if there are broken links, and if there are, you can fix them at this step.
Importance of monitoring website performance
- Ensure that the website is working well and all the links are directed to the right content.
- Keep the consistency of the design elements.
- Helps to rank well on the search result page.
- Guarantee the best user experience throughout the website.
Tools and techniques for monitoring website speed, uptime, and traffic
This is a free tool that I use more often to analyse the website’s speed and performance. More importantly, using this tool you can generate a detailed report on load time, page size, etc.
What I find more exciting is, it provides suggestions on how we can optimize our website’s speed.
A website monitoring tool that checks the website’s uptime and response time. It provides real-time alerts and reports on website uptime and also provides information on the location of visitors and how they interact with the website.
This tool was introduced by Google Inc. Using this tool you can evaluate the speed of your website on different devices; mobile and desktop.
Google Analytics
I have been using this analytic service for a while. I get detailed information on website traffic, bounce rate, what devices are used by the visitors, and how long they remain on my website.
Google Search Console
This is one of the most important tools I use to check my ranking on Google search results. In addition, I also can track crawl errors and fix them.
Managing website security
Keeping up-to-date SSL service is one of the things you can do to keep your website protected. In addition, you can frequently keep the plugins and content management system up-to-date.
Managing user-generated content
In this type of maintenance, you have to deal with the forum posts and comments on your website. You should make sure that they don’t violate the policies of your website.
In addition, you should also pay attention to taking action against spam content.
Keeping the content of your website, including the user-generated content under your control will help you to provide the best user experience for your website users.
More importantly, your website will be labelled as a trustworthy website.
Moreover, when the regular visitors notice that you keep control of the comments, they will be encouraged to share their thoughts.
How to handle spam and inappropriate content in your website?
Using spam filters
First of all, you should clearly define what would you consider inappropriate content on your website. Moreover, explaining the outcome for those who post inappropriate comments is also important.
However, dealing with this inappropriate content on your own would be complicated. You can’t keep an eye on your website 24/7 and check each and every comment to identify spam. Lol!
So how do you keep control of this user-generated content without any hassle?
Simply, you can use a spam filtering tool, which automatically detects such content and delete them from your website.
Some spam filters you can use on your websites.
- Akismet: A spam filtering plugin for WordPress.
- Anti-Spam Bee: A spam filtering plugin for WordPress. This has both automated and manual methods.
- Honeypot: The visitors can’t virtually detect this spam detector. For extra security, you can use this together with other spam filters.
By the way, if you use a spam filter, you should be careful to keep this plugin up-to-date.
Get support from your website users.
Apart from that, you can encourage your readers to report any spam or questionable content they come across on your website.
However, even though you installed a spam filter tool on your website, I like to recommend combining human inspection too.
Optimizing website content
Content optimization of a website makes sure that all the information on your website is up-to-date, relevant and high quality.
Furthermore, it also guarantees the website is friendly to both search engines and users.
Use Google Analytic results
To do this maintenance, you can get the help of Google Analytics results of your website. It gives a clear picture of webpages that are the most popular and where traffic is coming from.
So, you can identify which areas need modifications and take action to optimize the content.
Maintain the hierarchy of the content
Use headings and a proper scale for font so that the users can catch the hierarchy of the content at a glance.
In addition, for a better user experience, you should maintain the flow of your website so that the users know their next step.
Keep the paragraphs short
Moreover, users should be able to read the content seamlessly. For that, you can use a proper length for a paragraph.
Usually, I try to limit the number of lines in a paragraph to a maximum of 3.
Additionally, you can use images and videos in an effective way between the paragraphs. However, you should compress your images and use a more web-friendly format before uploading them to the site.
Webp is the image format that most web developers, including me, are using these days.
Optimize website content for search engines
SEO maintenance is really important to rank your website in search results.
You should add keywords that are relevant to your website. However, if you want to rank well locally, you should use local SEO techniques.
Keywords are not the only thing when optimizing a website for search engines. Your website should be user friendly, responsive as well as it should load quickly (well, there are much more).
I try my best to make my sites load before 2s of the request from users.
By the way, if you don’t have much knowledge about SEO, you can read the SEO guideline from Google. It is best for beginners.
Conclusion
Great, you are at the end of this article means, now you have a really good idea about why you should maintain your website, how you should do it, and all about website maintenance.
In addition, I’ve shared my procedure of maintaining my websites, so if you want you can follow all the steps I mentioned in this article.
