Once you have your website published and all your cool tech is in place, you might think you’re finished.
Maybe you need to put up a blog post or two, but what website maintenance can there be?
Don’t feel bad if you’re not very technical. Most people don’t think about the maintenance of their website is going to need.
Failing to maintain your website can cause major challenges however. Continue reading this article to learn more about front end and back end maintenance for your website.
Most Important Website Maintenance Tasks
While you might not be able to tackle this whole list at once, start from the top and work your way down. Taking care of the most important tasks first will allow you to avoid major problems while you’re getting your maintenance systems in place.
User Testing
With over 1.6 billion websites online currently, you can’t survive without doing user testing. If you want to be in the top websites online, you have to see how your website is serving the people that visit.
If it has been a long time since your website was built, you may be well overdue for a user testing session. You shouldn’t just test your website yourself. You should have unbiased people test your website to see how well put together and useful they say it is.
People that are used to using it shouldn’t be able to weigh in on how well the website functions. They’ve already gotten used to how it works and will be able to navigate easily.
Buy Your Own Products
One of the processes that rarely gets tested after it is set up is the purchase process.
You don’t want to find out about a major fail because a customer order had an error. The truth is that most people that experience errors in the checkout phase will just go find another vendor with a similar product.
In some cases you don’t need to fulfill the order but if you are testing to see how the whole process goes, make sure the fulfillment process goes the same as a customer’s would.
Are Your Forms Working?
It doesn’t matter how well you optimize your website forms if they aren’t working properly.
Test your forms on a regular basis to make sure there isn’t broken code or some other problem. You may have even typed your receiving email address improperly. If that is the case then all of your emails are going to the wrong – or nonexistent – email address.
Broken Links
If you have WordPress, you can easily install a broken link plugin for your site. Other platforms have different solutions and in some cases you’ll need to go through the site by hand.
A broken link is a link that is not working when you click it. The link may go to an error page or nowhere at all. Whatever the broken link is – it is NOT a good user experience.
Rid your site of all broken links ASAP. If you aren’t able to go through your whole site quickly, you should make sure your 404 error page is set up properly.
A 404 page is often overlooked but a well thought out 404 helps navigate your users to the most important aspects of your site and is highly important when a new website is replacing an old website.
At a bare minimum, your 404 error page should help direct users back to your home page to reset their user journey until you are able to fix the broken links.
What’s Working and What’s Not?
You can check your favorite analytics site to see how your website is performing. Many people use Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools to get much of their information.
These free tools from Google itself are some of the most helpful and in-depth tools you can use to see what is working on your website and what is bombing.
Do You Have a Site Backup?
What is something goes terribly wrong with your website? What if your host’s backup fails? Do you have a backup of your website?
The more regularly you update your website backup, the less you’ll lose in case of a problem.
There are many things that could take place such as a fire, hacker attack and more. You want to be as safe and possible. While you want your hosting provider to do their job – you also have to do your job to keep your website safe.
Backing up your website is often pretty simple. If you have WordPress, you can use a plugin to download your files. Save them in the cloud and on an external drive for the best safety for your website files.
Keeping Security Up to Date
You don’t want your website to get hacked but is your security up to date? If you fail to keep your security up to date, you are vulnerable to attacks.
The reason software update is because there was a problem or a gap with the last version. If you’re running a version other than the current version, the likelihood that you could have a problem is much higher.
If automatic updates aren’t available, you can set a reminder to check for updates on a weekly or even daily basis.
Don’t Just Sustain – Grow
When you’ve had a good run, it is easy to get comfortable. You don’t want to get stagnant only focusing on tasks like website maintenance.
You need to continue to grow your business to stay ahead of the competition. All it takes is one brilliant strategist and a bright team with insane work ethic and you’ve got true competition in your arena.
You don’t have to go on this journey on your own. Contact us today to find out how we can help you grow your business by leaps and bounds.
