Website Maintenance

Website maintenance is the act of regularly checking your website for issues and mistakes and keeping it updated and relevant. This should be done on a consistent basis in order to keep your website healthy, encourage continued traffic growth, and strengthen your SEO and Google rankings.

Keeping a website well maintained and attractive is important to companies big and small in order to engage and retain customers. It's easy for businesses, especially startups, to cut corners and let a few tasks slide. Website maintenance can easily become one of those things as it doesn't always present immediate issues. However, just like your health can fall apart if you go too long without a regular check up, so can the health of your website.

Regular monitoring of your website is a must for keeping your business running smoothly.

Steps in Website Maintenance

There is a laundry list of tasks that should be done to keep your website running smoothly. The most time-sensitive of these are website security updates and patches. Without these, your website has the potential to be an actual danger to those who click on it.

With that in mind, here is a list of website maintenance tasks that should be completed regularly

To be done weekly

Check that all of your pages are loading without errors
Run a backup and make sure a previous version of your site is stored
Make updates to website software and plugins
Check that all of your forms are running properly
Remove any spam comments from pages and posts
Check your pages to see if there are any broken links
Search for 404 errors and fix or redirect
Write one or more blog posts to keep your community engaged and encourage SEO traffic.

To be done monthly

Check the load speed of your website and ensure that nothing is bogging it down
Review your security scans and make sure nothing is out of place
Analyze website statistics from the previous month
Check your blog to see if there are any articles that could be updated

To be done quarterly

Review your website design and structure – can be it improved?
Check graphics and images – should anything be updated?
Test and tweak popups, forms, and calls to action
Test your website on all devices and browsers to see if it displays correctly

To be done yearly

Update any reference to the current year
Review each page for content accuracy, grammar, typos, and relevancy
Check any active email addresses and see if any are excessive and can be deleted
Ensure that your website domain name is renewed
Review all of your top performing blog articles and see if they can be updated with new content