Website Maintenance
You put a lot of effort into creating a website that encourages people to take the kinds of actions you want them to. However, there is an annoying tendency for internet usage to change over time.
Mark a time on the calendar to do usability testing once a year to ensure that your website continues to make intuitive sense to visitors across all popular browsers and devices including those you can't anticipate today who knows what people will be using in the future.
Bring in visitors who aren't connected to your company or brand so they may look at your website with new eyes. To obtain the entire picture, make sure your testing covers all browsers and device kinds that visitors might use.Additionally, establish a maintenance schedule for implementing any upgrades that your testing deems required. If you don't put the new information you learn into practise, the testing itself isn't very valuable.
Update Your Header, Footer And Polices
The essential elements of your website that remain the same across web pages are your header and footer. And they probably contain some crucial data, Make sure the information is current if, for instance, your header includes contact details, your address, or the hours your firm is open. You don't want a potential customer to visit your old location or during a closed period and discover they can't conduct business with you after all.
Make sure the web pages and categories you add here are the most crucial ones to showcase on your website, even if your header is straightforward and only contains your logo and main menu.
Your website's copyright information, including the date of copyright, is probably included in the footer. To safeguard all recent improvements you've made to your website in the past year, you should also maintain that current. Additionally, make sure here that any links you provide in the footer are the ones you wish to emphasise to visitors.
Ecommerce Websites
The purchasing feature of your website is the most crucial one in terms of eCommerce website features. You could lose a lot of money if it stops working or even just has glitches until you find and repair the issue. Most of your visitors will just visit a competitor's website and make their purchases there rather than taking the effort to let you know they were unable to make a purchase from you.
Therefore, have someone from the company make a few test purchases at least once every few months to see how the procedure works. They should perform this on many platforms and web browsers so you can determine if there are any process hiccups.
Fix Broken Links
It's disappointing every time someone clicks on a link that takes them to a 404 page. Preventive maintenance is necessary since a dead link on your website detracts from the image of your company and directs visitors away from the page you want them to be on.
Whatever you do, you'll occasionally have broken links on your website because the websites you connect to move, disappear, or change domains. Even while you might not be able to totally prevent them, you can make sure they don't stay on your website for very long by including it in your routine website maintenance. Check for broken links every few months, then fix or replace them.
Contrary to popular belief, locating broken connections and internal links is actually quite simple. Many free programmes are available that automatically scan webpages for broken links, such as Google Search Console (which also comes with a tonne of other helpful features).
Check Domain Renewal
You've put a lot of money into your website. Imagine that you tried to access your website when you woke up the following morning, but instead of finding it, you discovered a page stating that the domain name had expired. Even worse, your domain registrar overflowed the page with details on how someone else can buy it—possibly even having previously put it up for sale.
Although it may seem implausible to you, many individuals and organisations have experienced it before you. Losing control of your domain name could mean losing all the work you've put into establishing the authority and online presence of your website. It's also shockingly simple for busy business owners to let something fall between the gaps.
You don't want to take that kind of risk. Check the status of your domain name renewal at least once a year. Setting up auto-renew is the best strategy to protect your domain name (and, by extension, your website). Then, aside from keeping your payment information current, you seldom ever need to worry about it.
Check Contact Forms
You should be certain that all contact forms on your website function properly if you want people to fill them out, Go through the process of completing all the forms on the website while making your test purchases.
Make sure to test them on all the devices and browsers that your visitors may use in this situation as well. Ensure that the person who is supposed to receive the form receives all of the information supplied, You risk losing out on profitable leads if any of your forms aren't functioning properly, so be careful to identify the issue as soon as possible.
Website Security
There are undoubtedly more low-profile security breaches than you are aware of because you always hear about high-profile ones. Anyone who maintains a website needs to prioritise protecting it against hackers, and eCommerce companies that deal with client data have even greater reasons to do so.
Verifying that all of your platforms, plugins, and scripts are up to date is one of the most crucial website maintenance procedures you should plan on for security. Updates for these are typically released by developers to increase security or fix a vulnerability they discovered.
Spend a moment verifying that your website is still operating properly after making an update. If you use WordPress, it's possible that periodically a WordPress update will interfere with a plugin you use, and if this happens, you might lose crucial functionality. Don't let the thought of losing functionality deter you from finishing this stage, even though it may sound frightening. It's much less terrifying than being hacked.
Take Regular Website Backups
All of us have experienced the scenario where we labour all day on a project, and then our computer malfunctions and we lose everything. If this has already happened to you, you've probably gotten pretty adept at maintaining your computer backups to prevent such problems in the future.
However, if you're not careful, your website may experience the same issue. If a hacker manages to get in, they might eliminate you all at once. It will be much simpler to fix the issue if you have a current website backup solution, though.
To save yourself the time and effort of treating this as a distinct website maintenance process, you can invest in a backup system like CodeGuard. However, if you don't, be sure to schedule the creation of an updated backup of your website at least once every month.
Review Analytics Data
Many helpful details about how users find and use your website are provided by Google Analytics. By checking in to check your analytics at least once a week, you can make sure that your website is doing what you want it to and determine what aspects need to be improved.
Some businesses will gain from reviewing it more frequently than that, and new ones should anticipate slow traffic at first, but it's crucial to monitor your website's development and performance as you go. The best location to accomplish that is Google Analytics, which is also a valuable tool for learning how to boost factors like SEO and site engagement.
