A Complete Website Maintenance Checklist for 2024
Whether it’s a human or a plant- we all need good care and guidance for growing up healthily. We know all how negligence affects anyone or anything- slowly all fall off! Similarly, when we talk about the website and how it is growing- website maintenance plays a vital part in this. It doesn’t matter how big your company is, what you offer, and how compelling your branding is – One massive mistake or negligence can make you out of the winning game of yours. Don’t let this happen!
Having a dreadful web team can be the reason for your loss. So, it is crucial that you have a website maintenance checklist to make your journey safe and easy. With a proper checklist, you can manage the website maintenance process effortlessly. First and foremost, you need to have a clear idea of what website maintenance is and why it is important for your website. Let’s get started:
What is Website Maintenance?
In simple words, website maintenance is the process of ensuring your website is safe, secure, well organized, running smoothly, and providing a great user experience. However, there are many things you need to consider when it comes to maintaining your website. The tasks associated with website maintenance include:
1. Content Reviews:
It is important to review every piece of content on your website in order to discover broken pages and HTML code or images that mostly take time to load.
2. Security Updates:
To ensure your website is safe and secure, you must update your content management system or check for plugins.
3. Technical Audits:
Checking your website scrolling time, and navigation process, and ensuring whether the pages are crawlable or not and the more you solve technical issues the more your site gives a better user experience.
4. Traffic Metrics:
It is crucial to check traffic metrics to detect issues that help you to offer seamless navigation.
5. Design Audits:
Check on website design which makes your website loading speed low and what you need to improve your website loading speed.
Moreover, many things fall under the website maintenance checklist but that depends on what kind of website you have, the industry you are in, and the platform you use to run your website.
Why is Website Maintenance Important?
Website maintenance goes beyond “my website works”. If you want results such as more traffic, visibility, and more customers, then your website needs to work properly.
According to recent data, online shopping habits have increased in over 67% of people after the pandemic of covid19. Conversion rates get higher for the website that loads within 1 second than the website that loads over 10 seconds. According to Google, website loading time should be between 1-1.65 seconds. Experts say that over 45% of websites get less impression due to slow loading speed.
How to Do Website Maintenance for Beginners?
The website has been built with many moving parts. So, it needs to be maintained so that websites offer a seamless user experience. Since you already have a clear idea of what website maintenance is and the importance of website maintenance. Now we are going to discuss the website maintenance process for beginners which is mentioned below:
1. Check Your Website Speed:
How fast your website is loading plays a crucial role in your online success. When your users are looking for an answer and your website has one but at the right time, it takes much longer to open, then users get frustrated and move on to your competitor’s website.
Use tools like Google’s Pagespeed Insight, you will get to know about your page speed. If you find your website loads slowly, then it is time to take action with technical audits and discover the reasons behind it. You need to remember to check your website loading speed from various devices.
2. Remove Unused Plugins:
To maintain a website seamlessly, you need to remove unnecessary and unused plugins. Deleting unused plugins not only helps you maintain website security but also helps you with content management system clearance and easy navigation.
3. Backup Your Site:
To keep your website alive, backing up your site should be the primary step of website maintenance. You can update your website content and pages, so your pages work again seamlessly. A website has lots of data. To overcome the fear of losing all data, you need to back up all data. A regular site backup prevents the loss of countless hours of work caused by such hiccups.
Mostly every Content Management System (CMS) has the automatic backup feature. Ensure that the feature is on to prevent your site from any disaster. However, you can download files to make sure the hard drive of your website is secure.
4. Perform Security Updates:
It is crucial to prioritize website security because it not only puts your company at risk but also jeopardizes the confidentiality of your customers’ data. So, don’t make that huge mistake! Check whether your CMS/platform is up to date or not. If you find any outdated plugins that can be the reason for your website security vulnerabilities.
5. Look for Broken Links:
Fixing the broken links should always be on the list of the website maintenance checkerboard. Sometimes we create content and we link something important to other websites or pages within the content. So that our target audience gets valuable information about the specific topic and the process of this link-building helps our websites get indexed by search engines like Google, Bing, and more.
Using Google Search Console you can easily find broken links on your website. But when you discover the broken links, you need to fix those with the following process:
- Update the outdated content of the page
- Check if there are any spelling mistakes or errors or not
- Converting your old content to a new page on your site by setting up redirects
- Remove the link and replace it with a different page.
6. Use Content Analytics Tool:
Check your website performance by using content analytics tools regularly. Using various metrics you can check website performance:
- Low-performing pages
- Month-over-month trend
- Site traffic
- Pages with a high bounce rate
- High-performing pages
If you see you aren’t getting any kind of website traffic, your website might be facing any kind of technical issues that weaken the SEO performance of your website. Also, if you see your website article isn’t performing well, it is possible to have broken elements on this page. However, using Google Search Console or Google Analytics can help you to see your website and content performance.
7. Check the Browser Compatibility:
Sometimes websites crash and burn down on various browsers like Edge, Safari, and more. This can also happen on various devices like mobile, tablets, and more. It is important to run the speed test on your website if you want your website to run seamlessly on various devices and browsers. Ensure that site speed is the same for different browsers and devices. So that website can offer a great user experience for all their target audience.
8. Conduct the Content Audit:
In the website maintenance process, content plays a crucial role. It is important that all content of your website including blog, web page content, press release, and more need to be audited. Having outdated content can be the cause of a high bounce rate. Moreover, image files can affect your website speed. For conducting a content audit, you need to check the following points which are mentioned below:
- Broken links
- Large image files
- Broken images
- Complex design
- Outdated content
It is crucial to conduct a content audit every quarter. It helps to maintain your website performance, speed up your website loading time, and moreover, your website runs on the platforms seamlessly.
9. Test Site Forms:
The effectiveness of contact forms and lead forms depends on how well they work. All site forms require your attention from time to time, whether they are newly launched landing pages for gated assets or old contact forms.
Try sending a test email and completing any forms on your website. Ensure that test site forms not only show the results based on the company’s inbox but also the forms should gather all the correct information.
10. Reduce the Size of Image Files:
Did you know that one large image file can impact your Google Core web vital scores? Most of the time, large image files are converted into crisp hero images for the fast-loading website speed. According to experts, to make your website run properly and seamlessly, you need to keep your image file size less than 1 Mb. That’s why you need to use the compression tool to run your website image file size. After compressing the images, and reuploading them to the website. So, that your website performs perfectly.
11. Update the Header and Footers:
Don’t forget header and footer copy, because most of the time marketing professionals check these kinds of copy while auditing your website. Here is some information we need to check in your header and footer copy which are mentioned below:
- Terms of service
- Contact information
- Important links
- Copyright information
- Privacy policy
- Certifications
It is essential to ensure the information you put is correct and up to date. If your company decides to add something to its privacy policy or terms of service, then the page content needs to change.
12. Create a 404 Page:
Linking to websites is always a bit risky, as there’s always a chance that someone may enter the wrong URL or the link may break for some reason. In such cases, it’s important to have a helpful 404 page that can guide your audience to the appropriate page and keep them engaged with your website.
If you still don’t have any, then it is high time to create one in order to notify your target audience that they are in the wrong place. Then, provide them with what they want to see- quality services or products and helpful resources. This process will be useful for your audience to discover what they are looking for. Moreover, it helps your website to build some internal links which enables you to improve your website Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
How Often We Should Do Website Maintenance?
Website maintenance is crucial for ensuring your website is secure, running smoothly, and providing a great user experience. Neglecting website maintenance can result in broken pages, slow loading times, and security vulnerabilities, which can impact your online success. Thus, it is important to establish a regular website maintenance schedule.
The frequency of website maintenance depends on several factors, including the size and complexity of your website, the type of content you publish, and the frequency of updates. A small website with simple content may require maintenance once a month, while larger websites with complex content may require maintenance every day.
Content is the heart of your website, and it needs to be updated regularly. Aim to update your website content at least once a month, as fresh content attracts visitors and improves your website’s search engine ranking. Security vulnerabilities can be exploited by hackers to compromise your website. To prevent this, ensure that all software, including your content management system (CMS), plugins, and themes, is up-to-date with the latest security patches.
Speed is a critical factor in website performance. Optimize your website’s performance by compressing images, minifying code, and leveraging browser caching. Back up your website regularly to avoid losing data in case of server crashes, hacking attacks, or other disasters. Regularly perform technical audits to identify and fix any broken links, HTML code, or images that may be affecting your website’s user experience.
Conclusion
Website maintenance is essential for ensuring your website is secure, fast, and user-friendly. Establishing a regular maintenance schedule will help you stay on top of updates, reduce downtime, and provide a better experience for your visitors.
We hope this article on a complete website maintenance checklist for 2024 will help you to understand it better. If you want your website to run well on the platforms, then contact us, a leading web development company. We can help you with our web development and design services along with our digital marketing services. If you want to know more about trending topics, keep your eye on our blog page.
