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Website Maintenance Checklist to Avoid Technical Glitches

What is Website Maintenance?

Website maintenance keeps your website secure and performant, which reduces the chances of downtime.

When you own a website, you don't just write articles and publish them for the world to read. You design, plan, write, research, test, implement and maintain it. You don't even need any special coding skills; however, keeping your site updated is not something that can be ignored.

Read on to find out how you can keep your website healthy and updated by following a few simple steps.

Benefits of Website Maintenance

Updating your website regularly keeps its content fresh and adds new features that may benefit users as well as search engines.

Your website will be more secure from hackers or failures due to outdated software or operating systems.

You won't lose traffic if your site goes down for any reason. This is particularly important as Google ranks websites higher in web searches when they're up and running, rather than offline.

An updated website can gain you more visitors and free traffic.

Website maintenance is less costly than dealing with unforeseen problems that are difficult to fix once they arise, such as broken pages or lost traffic due to downtime.

Maintenance Checklist to Avoid Technical Glitches

Here's a simple checklist of the main things you should do before making any website changes:  

Check Your Website Speed

Every second your website takes to load is time that potential customers spend away from your business. Slow loading times have been shown to reduce user engagement, which doesn't give you a good return on investment toward search engine rankings.   

Test your website's speed with Pingdom tools, which send requests from various locations around the world and tell you how long each one takes to load. Then check this data against industry benchmarks (1 second is the ideal) to see if any improvements need to be made.

Renew Website Domain Name and SSL Certificate

If your website still uses an HTTP protocol instead of HTTPS, you should change that immediately since it's more secure. You can also improve trust by installing an SSL certificate on your site, which tells web browsers that they are safe to transact with you online. Keep in mind that changing domain names is easy these days due to services like Namecheap, which lets you switch over all your DNS records and other elements easily and affordably.

Check Your Backups

Backups are a necessary part of website maintenance because they help you recover lost website content and reduce the chances of a crash if something goes wrong with the website.

The various ways backups can be done is by using:

A- The server's backup function (most web hosts provide one)

B- A software such as Akeeba Backup to set up daily, weekly, and monthly automated backups for your whole site or specific areas/modules of your site, including database and files

C- Manual backup to download and save all changes made on your site -images, pages, videos, etc. To manually saved in external storage devices like pen drive, hard drive, etc. to keep copies for disaster recovery later. For people with larger websites, this may require a backup plugin for specific CMS systems such as WordPress.

Your website might not be fully protected if you're only doing backups occasionally, or aren't creating offsite backups. If a hacker wants access to your site badly enough, they'll find a way to breach it if backups aren't included.   

It's not that difficult to keep your website backed up regularly. Services like CodeGuard make backing up and restoring websites easy because you can do it from the same place where you manage other services for your website.      You should also consider setting up offsite backups at an external location, preferably in another country or hemisphere, so your data is less likely to be lost due to natural disasters or other unforeseen circumstances.  

Backups are like insurance policies – don't expect anything to happen but still hope for the best! If something does happen, you will have a backup to save the day. You can automate this process or at least check them manually once in a while.

Security updates and bug fixes

To continue using the most recent versions of PHP, MySQL, etc., security updates must be applied regularly. If these applications are not updated, website visitors may face security vulnerabilities.

As far as bugs are concerned, WordPress is one of the most popular CMS systems at the moment with thousands of plugins and themes to choose from. Bugs are common in these types of software because they are created by voluntary developers who usually write free code for the WordPress community without expecting financial returns.

Check Your Website Responsiveness

A mobile-friendly website is one that has been specifically designed for viewing on smartphones, tablets, and desktop computers. If yours isn't responsive yet (and most aren't), it's likely losing valuable traffic. If you can, redesign your site so it responds to different screen resolutions and adjusts according to the viewer's preferred device.   

Check Your Website for Broken Links and 404 Errors

Fixing broken links is important because search engine crawlers monitor these errors and report them as signs that your site isn't well-maintained or reliable. You can use free resources like Xenu Link Sleuth to find broken links on your website. Once you've located them, simply delete or replace those pages with working content.  

Broken links or 404 errors will appear when any link on your website points to an incorrect destination or the resource is not found in the location where it should be, resulting in visitor frustration and abandoning their shopping carts. To fix these types of errors search for all wrong destinations and redirect them to relevant pages you want them to land on. You can use free tools like Xenu's Link Sleuth and Screaming Frog SEO Spider for this purpose.

Many security issues arise due to user error, along with careless mistakes that are easy enough to avoid if you're aware of them. While maintaining a WordPress blog, for example, you should use strong usernames and passwords, avoid using plugins that aren't regularly updated, edit your .htaccess file to increase website security, and always remember to use reputable hosting services.

Reply to Form Inquiries

Serving customers is an integral part of any successful business. Unfortunately, if you don't have the time or resources for this, they might head to your competitor's site instead. In order to keep sales coming in from all channels (including the contact form on your website), make sure you reply to prospects within one business day.   

Reply to all inquiries that get posted on your contact forms (including queries submitted via emails). Even if it's a simple message like "We will try and get back to you as soon as possible," this shows that you care about customer service and helps build a rapport with your visitors.

Be sure you always have someone available who can read emails sent through your site's contact form and forward them along to the correct individuals within the organization so they're not left sitting in a spam folder or designated "social" folder.   

Check Your Website Speed

Your website's speed is one of the biggest factors in how Google ranks your pages, so if yours isn't up to snuff you could be losing traffic. You should regularly check Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom Tools, and GTmetrix for tips on how to improve load time.  

A faster website means increased visitor satisfaction, higher rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs), and lower bounce rates, which is why page loading times should be regularly checked. Tools like Google Analytics offers the option to view average loading times for specific pages on your site. If it's taking too long to load individual posts or static images -try reducing the size of these files through re-compression or using alternative options like SiteGround SuperCacher), this will increase website speed dramatically. 

Measure Your Website Performance

If you're looking for ways to measure website performance after implementing improvements, try using services like WebPagetest, New Relic, or ClickDensity. These tools will tell you how your website looks from a performance perspective and help you gauge whether or not it's faster since the last time you checked. 

Apart from measuring speed, Google PageSpeed Insight will give you a detailed report on how fast various files on your site load and which ones need immediate attention. Optimize everything from texts to images with this free tool for a bigger and better user experience.

Renew Your Domain Name and SSL certificate

The internet has come a long way in the past few years, but nobody knows exactly what's coming next to change everything yet again. You can prepare by making sure your domain name is renewed so that another company doesn't snatch it up when you're not looking.   

Domain names and SSL certificates often expire without users knowing about them. So keep track of them by renewing them prior to they come close to expiry; otherwise, you might lose SEO benefits as well as search rankings if they become disabled unexpectedly.

These are some of the most overlooked parts of web hosting but they play a crucial role in delivering an exceptional user experience.

Renewing the domain name ensures that it stays with its current host if there is a need to move sites from their current hosts due to poor support or high costs. Domain names should be renewed every year for this reason. In order to be sure that the process is done in time, set up a calendar reminder on your phone or PC weeks before the expiration date of the domain name.

If possible, renew your domain names for multi-year periods instead of just one year at a time. This will save both money and stress down the line because you won't have to worry about losing your blog address if something goes wrong with your payment history.

Update Your Copyright

If you want to show site visitors that your blog is up-to-date and current, make sure you update the copyright year on your site. Even though it doesn't have any bearing on search rankings, this simple step will avoid confusing or frustrating readers who visit your site regularly.   

It doesn't matter how many times your site was updated last year; by setting the updated dates on all pages regularly you are sending out messages of freshness to search engines which will definitely boost up rankings over time.

Many website owners aren't aware of what maintenance entails. If yours has gotten a little behind in recent months/years, now would be a good time to enforce some more stringent policies so that all members of the Internet community have equal access to it. These are just ten things related to a website maintenance that you can use as part of your checklist -- there are many more small steps you can take every day to keep your online presence running smoothly.

Conclusion

These are some of the most important points to check when it comes to maintaining a high-quality website for visitors and search engines alike so… If you care about your site's performance, user experience and would like others to visit again - follow this checklist once in a while.

You need to make sure that your technology is up-to-date, secure, and able to handle anything the future may hold. To do this, you will have to schedule regular maintenance of your site in order to avoid technical glitches. Think about it as an investment for the future - with time it will definitely pay off!

The team at Pixel Street will design a professional website for your business and create it with customized features without costing too much. With our affordable prices, you can have the best web development service around!