Maintaining your website doesn’t have to be daunting. Let’s get you started with some valuable tips!
Congratulations on your stunning and fully functional website, which might have come at a significant cost. However, it’s essential to understand that having a website is not a one-time investment that will always run smoothly – just like a perfect marriage doesn’t happen overnight. Your website requires continuous care to thrive and avoid potential issues. Regular upkeep tasks are necessary to ensure optimal performance.
We live in a world where no website is immune to threats, and it’s crucial to implement maintenance strategies to stay ahead of malicious actors. Vigilance against security vulnerabilities is paramount, as these flaws can be exploited by unauthorized users.
To minimize the chances of making mistakes, it’s beneficial to have a basic understanding of SQL, panels, phpMyAdmin, and a broad knowledge of how websites function. So, let’s learn the essential steps that you must need to know.
Learn from Website Maintenance Guide
In this comprehensive guide, I will walk you through the essential steps of website maintenance, ensuring that your online presence remains secure, up-to-date, and performing at its best.
“If there’s one thing you learn from working on a variety of different Websites, it’s that almost any design idea–no matter how abhorrently bad it is–can be made usable in the right circumstances, with enough effort.” Steve Krug.
Let’s embark on this journey to keep your website running like a well-oiled machine!
1. Website Speed Evaluation
You do not offer items, but rather an experience. So, if your website takes more than 3 seconds to open, it adds to a poor user experience, which Google penalizes by lowering its search engine ranking.
Check the speed of your website frequently to ensure increased visitors and revenues. Page Speed Insights is useful for testing page speed and providing ideas for improvement.
2. Broken Link 301 Redirect
404 errors are nearly always deadly for an e-commerce website. To avoid this, use the 301 redirect to redirect broken links to other comparable websites.
3. Improve WordPress
It’s critical not to lose out on new Word Press features if you want to protect the security of your website. Always update your website to the most recent version.
4. Delete Unwanted Themes
Outdated themes and plugins are one of the most typical reasons for a hacked website. Thus, deleting undesirable themes and plugins is critical to increasing website security, which also slows down your website.
5. Examine for Broken Links
Broken links have a detrimental influence on search engine results because they prevent search engine robots from crawling and indexing your site properly. Always check for broken links and repair them as soon as possible. Screaming Frog is an amazing tool for detecting missing/broken links and other SEO issues on your site.
6. Improve Database Table
A large number of media assets, themes, and plugins all contribute to poor website speed. Always remember to delete database tables after removing a plugin or theme to help optimize your website.
7. Examine Browser and Device Compatibility
If your website is accessible via several browsers and devices, you must ensure that you are not losing potential visitors. Always remember to test your website’s compatibility on all of them.
8. Remove Media Files
One of the most common causes of storage space exhaustion is the presence of redundant or transient media files. To increase the speed of your website, clear out unnecessary trash from your media library.
9. Verify Download Links
You must verify your download links frequently to ensure your readers do not receive faulty files and documents.
10. Examine the Site’s Navigation
Users are frequently irritated by broken links in the navigation. Check all navigation links on your site to ensure a pleasant user experience.
11. Image Optimization
Always optimize all photos on your website since unoptimized images add to a poor user experience by slowing down the site. You can ensure delighted users as well as increased search engine indexing by optimizing photos.
12. Verify Form Functionality
Many websites rely on contact forms to generate leads for their businesses. If this is the case for you, then testing the operation of email opt-ins and contact forms is critical.
13. Examine Google Analytics
Google Analytics gives information about how well your website is working and which medium delivers the most traffic. Reviewing the metrics every week might assist you in developing methods to boost your conversion rate.
14. Examine Google Webmaster
Examining critical information such as backlinks, keywords, and search terms. Queries are necessary for SEO purposes. Google Search Console is a fantastic free SEO tool that you should utilize regularly to determine where you stand. You can use Ettvi to get keywords, backlink analysis, and more for SEO.
15. Examine the Resources Used
Monitoring the resources used by multiple plugins on your website is crucial for maintaining optimal site performance.
16. Turn off automatic WordPress updates
Automatic WordPress upgrades may be disastrous not just for your SEO but also for your general security.
To protect your site from breaking, always turn off automatic updates.
17. Perform Scheduled Backups
Along with your database, make frequent backups of your complete website. So, if it crashes, you may always restore it without losing any crucial data. Backup Machine is a free utility that can effectively do automated backups.
18. Examine On-Page SEO
For an SEO-friendly website, make sure that all SEO-related aspects are present in your content.
19. Examine Website Security
Website security should always be your priority in your daily website maintenance routine to ensure that your website is clear of any malware or viruses that might possibly harm it. Make sure you receive a weekly report on the security of your server as well.
20. Examine Your Site’s Feed
The RSS feed automatically informs your followers whenever you publish new information or make modifications to your site. It is critical to maintain an eye on traffic to prevent losing it.
21. Malware Detection
Perform a daily or weekly malware check to ensure that your website is free of anything that might compromise its security.
22. Examine Web Host Statistics
Checking the web host statistics for server uptime, bandwidth utilization, disc space, CPU throttling, and so on is a must-do maintenance chore.
23. Renew Hosting and Domains
To avoid downtime on your website, you must renew your hosting and domains on schedule.
24. Examine affiliate links
To prevent a Google penalty, maintain your affiliate links up to date to avoid losing potential traffic and leads.
25. Perform a Word Press Checkup
WP inspection identifies any flaws on your site that may have a negative influence on its security, performance, or SEO.
Concluding Thoughts
Website maintenance is like changing the oil in your automobile; without adequate maintenance, your website will not function well in the long run. You must hold yourself accountable for any efforts to increase traffic, boost sales and leads to your website. You can get website maintenance services from Software Pro and HTML Pro. With all of these website maintenance strategies in place, your website will operate smoothly.
