Ellie
No one wants a dirty room. It gives us an ick, and our skins crawl at the sight of dust bunnies, spider webs, and millions of bacteria. To keep it clean and sanitary, you need to maintain it. Just like houses, websites also need proper maintenance.
A website is essentially your company’s home. It houses your entire business, and its web pages are your products’ rooms. Like a normal house, it has an address (a URL) that people can search to visit you. So it’s only right to keep it well-maintained and clean. After all, who would want to visit and stay at a messy home?
That’s where web maintenance comes in. It sweeps up all the dust and dirt in your site like a well-powered vacuum, leaving a sparkling clean and germ-free home. Let us elaborate further.
Website maintenance is the process of keeping your website up-to-date and functioning properly by undergoing monthly, quarterly, or annual internal checks. Regular maintenance allows you to check if your website is running optimally. If not well-maintained, a website may stop working altogether.
Web maintenance includes regularly updating your web content, removing outdated blogs or posts, and fixing links in your website. It keeps your site safe and virus-free. Doing so makes your site look professional, relevant, and reliable.
A smoothly running website goes both ways: you maintain your site’s web traffic while ensuring that your target audience gets the best user experience as they visit and browse through your site. A user’s first impression of a website will always last, and we want to ensure that we give these users our best.
To keep your website functioning properly, experts advise that it be done once a month, more frequently even better. You wouldn’t want live in a house that’s only twice cleaned in a year!
The standard maintenance cost ranges from $50-$200 per month, but this will mostly depend on the complexity and size of your site.
Like a proper cleaning job, you must do many chores before your website gets cleaned. To ensure a fully functional site, you have to thoroughly monitor and check all the ins and outs of your website, which can be a lot.
Don’t worry; we’ve prepared a checklist of website maintenance tasks to guide you through it.
Assessing your website’s performance is the first step of web maintenance. Knowing what you’re working with is crucial. Performance monitoring will help you identify potential problems in your program and locate the vulnerabilities in your system.
On the other hand, optimizing site performance can improve your site’s speed and web pages’ loading times. Optimization can prevent technical glitches from randomly popping up on your site. A slow-loading and laggy website can turn away potential customers and lead to losses; we want to avoid that as much as possible.
Everything on the internet goes by so fast. Trends come and go and become fads overnight. As a business owner, you must be in the loop, so you don’t fall behind.
Regularly updating your website content is the best way to do so. You have to release new blog posts now and then to put your business’ name on the map and encourage web page engagement. This can get you more clicks on your page, so you get more revenue. You can also freshen up your content by removing outdated blogs.
Your product and service descriptions must also be up to date to make your site and business look trustworthy and respectable. Updated descriptions encourage more people to avail of your products. Likewise, product and service images are also important. Customers heavily rely on the photos you provide, so upload high-quality images to enhance user experience.
Make sure your website is always available and easily accessible to customers. That’s what uptime monitoring is for: it checks your website regularly to see if it’s up and running. This maintenance procedure will automatically inform you when your website is down to help you get it back up as soon as possible.
Meanwhile, search engine optimization (SEO) monitoring assesses your website’s visibility on the world wide web. With this, you can monitor how your website fairs in search engine rankings so you can evaluate your site’s engagement. Assessing your website’s SEO traffic can help maintain or even improve your site’s ranking on search engines.
Anyone can be a customer. It’s important to consider your website’s accessibility so that everyone will feel welcome and included while using your site.
Consider how people with disabilities, different gadgets, slow internet access, and even those who are first-time users will access and navigate your website. Checking accessibility can ensure an inclusive user experience.
While we aim for a great deal of web traffic, having more and more people enter your site will have consequences. Uncontrolled traffic may slow down site performance, so managing your site’s users is best.
User management involves managing your users’ accounts on your site. Deleting bots and unused and spam accounts will free up your site’s cache. You must also manage user permissions to avoid anyone from accessing possible private data.
In 2015, a 13-year-old hacker got into Apple’s systems. This breach didn’t only stain the company’s reputation; it also endangered millions of Apple’s consumers and their privacy. We don’t want any hackers to get into our systems, do we?
That’s why it’s important to monitor your site’s security as much as you monitor its performance. Web maintenance also ensures that your website is safe and secure to avoid letting unwanted site visitors in. Scanning your site’s security will determine where your site’s blind spots are. Doing so will protect your data and users’ information.
Let’s say you’ve done security scanning and found a blind spot in your site’s software. You can address this by installing and updating your security patches and settings. A security patch updates your system by “patching up” the blind spots or website software vulnerabilities. It acts as a security wall to keep possible intruders out of your property.
A system should also have regularly installed plugins and theme updates to continue running smoothly. Updates for plugin and theme includes bug fixes, new features, and better security patches to ensure your site’s performance. You can prevent hackers from entering your site by keeping your security measures up to date.
Whether you’re creating a business or going out for lunch, it’s important to have a backup plan in case things mess up.
That’s why having a disaster recovery plan and data backup is important. You must get your site running ASAP in case of a hacking incident or a system failure. If your website crashes and all your coded information gets erased, uploading all your data back onto your site may take a long time if you don’t have a backup.
After reading all the information above, web maintenance may seem scary and intimidating. But don’t fret. We won’t just leave you on your own as you enter the world of web maintenance. Here are five reminders on how to maintain your own website:
Web maintenance is complex and tricky, especially if you have no prior experience in programming and web development. Of course, you can do all those tasks independently, but that would be time-consuming. Plus, you’re bound to make mistakes, and if you’re unlucky, it may cost you quite a few bucks just to fix minor mistakes.
Hiring a web developer and their web maintenance service can help you out! Mesmeric is a web development company that offers website design maintenance services exclusively for e-commerce brands. We have a variety of creative and technical services, ranging from web and UI/UX design to website and content management.
Check our website maintenance packages here!
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