Your website is often the first point of contact with your customers. It is a powerful tool that can help businesses establish their online presence, attract new customers, and engage with their existing ones. However, just having a website is not enough. To ensure that your website runs smoothly and remains effective, it is crucial to perform regular site maintenance.
From updating software and plugins to monitoring site speed and security, maintaining your site will not only improve your website’s performance but also enhance your overall online presence. Read on to discover how you can keep your website in top shape and drive better results.
Why Website Maintenance is even a thing
Website maintenance is crucial for every business that wants to maintain an online presence. It is the process of regularly checking your website for issues, errors, and updates to ensure that it’s running smoothly, efficiently, and securely.
Improved site performance
Website maintenance can improve your site’s performance by identifying and fixing issues that may slow down your website. Regular maintenance tasks, such as updating software and plugins, can also improve your website’s speed and functionality.
Better user experience
A well-maintained website provides a better user experience. Websites that are easy to navigate, load quickly, and are free of errors are more likely to keep visitors engaged and interested in your business.
Increased security
Website maintenance can help you identify and fix security vulnerabilities that may put your website and your customers’ data at risk. Regular software updates, backups, and security scans can help protect your website from hacking attempts and malware.
Higher search engine rankings
Search engines favor websites that are well-maintained and up-to-date. Regularly updating your website with fresh, relevant content and optimizing it for search engines can improve your website’s search engine rankings and visibility.
Top 5 essential site maintenance tasks
1. Regular backups & updates
One of the most important site maintenance tasks is to regularly update your website with the latest software and security patches. This includes updating your content management system (CMS), plugins, and themes. These updates can help improve your website’s speed, functionality, and security.
However, before updating, it’s crucial to make a full back up your website to ensure that you can roll back to a previous version if anything goes wrong. This can be done manually or with the help of a backup plugin.
2. Security Measures
Website security is essential to protect your website from hacking attempts and malware. There are several security measures you can take to ensure that your website is secure, including:
- Installing a security plugin that can monitor your website for suspicious activity and block malicious users.
- Using a strong password and changing it regularly.
- Enabling two-factor authentication for your website.
- Installing an SSL certificate to encrypt data between your website and your visitors.
3. Optimisation for speed and performance
Website speed is critical for providing a good user experience and improving your website’s search engine rankings. To optimize your website for speed and performance, you can:
- Use a fast and reliable web hosting provider. Opt for a local server (Australia) or use a local CDN
- Optimize images and other media files to reduce their size.
- Minify CSS and JavaScript files to reduce their file size.
- Use caching to reduce page load times.
4. Fixing broken links & errors
Broken links and errors can negatively impact your website’s user experience and search engine rankings. Regularly checking for broken links and errors and fixing them can help improve your website’s overall performance. You can use a broken link checker plugin to automate the process.
5. Monitoring website analytics
Monitoring your website analytics can help you identify issues and opportunities for improvement. You can use tools such as Google Analytics to track your website’s traffic, user behavior, and conversion rates. This data can help you identify pages that need improvement, content that resonates with your audience, and opportunities to optimize your website for search engines.
Site maintenance help?
As you now know, site maintenance is so much more than just clicking the update button on plugins when they are shouting at you. Keeping up to date with plugin conflicts, ensuring functional backups and also monitoring the hosting server/website for errors, broken links and other issues can become quite technical.
If you are a small business owner already wearing too many hats, Thorn Creative offer affordable, all-inclusive site maintenance plans for all websites built on WordPress. If your site is not on WordPress, you may consider an upgrade, otherwise we are unable to help.
