Website maintenance is essential if you want your site to run efficiently and reliably. Unfortunately, website upkeep usually takes a backseat priority to the hundreds of other things a small business operator has to fit into their day.
It becomes even more difficult if there’s no-one in the business doesn’t with the necessary knowledge or access to appropriate tools to undertake website care effectively.
That’s why we’ve put together this simple website maintenance checklist to make sure you don’t forget any of the important things you need to do to keep your website in top shape. We’ve also put it into priority order, so you can concentrate on the top items, and then when do you get some available time, try the other things we suggest further down the article.
Of course, if you’d like a professional to manage your website maintenance, then contact us. We aren’t expensive. Honest!
Top Priority: Update software to stay safe
Google will shut down your sales leads.
Google will shut down your sales leads. You might infect website visitors too.
Timeliness Matters
Web server updates too
Increase your web maintenance productivity with intelligent tools
Because productivity matters so much in the small business world, we suggest using smart tools to help you get more done in less time. Here’s my favourite web update tools:
WordFence Central
This tool could easily be dismissed as just a good website internal firewall, but it’s far far more than that. The team at WordFence have created a cracking security product, with even the free plugin version delivers some fabulous functionality. In essence, it automatically incepts and neutralises hack attempts, but this product has so much more. Website Visitors behaving like hackers are automatically locked out to keep your website safe from them. The subscription version provides more timely exploit blocking and is strongly recommended.
The WordFence portal, or “WordFence Central“ takes this up a level. Central synchronises with the WordFence plugin in your website, providing alerts on numerous ‘hack risk’ related conditions such as out-of-date plugin updates, redundant plugins and a host of other useful security information and alerts.
WordFence Central also scales to support you when you have more than one website. It’s a top-shelf product!
So using this product, your receive near-real-time updates on system software updates required to minimise the risk of being hacked.
Top Priority: Backup Your Website
Make a copy of your website so that if you need to, you can restore it back to working.
The ‘experts’ will say you don’t need to do it, but if you lose your website they can’t reinstate it for you unless you do have a backup.
Websites are just bits of software running on computers and are no different to your PC or phone. Things go wrong. Software gets corrupt. Even entire web servers fail from time to time. A backup is like a website disaster insurance policy – only cheaper.
It’s not hard, it’s not painful. There’s free plugins that do a great job of doing regular backups. My personal favourite backup type is one that stores a working copy on storage separate from where your website runs. Then if your web server crashes you can recreate your site on another one. Also consider running backups regularly and create multiple backup copies.
If like many businesses, your website is WordPress or Joomla then you’ll also need to backup its database. If you don’t, your restored backup wont be able to recreate a fully functional copy of your website.
Read more about backups here: WordPress Maintenance Service | Website Concierge
Top Priority: Domain Renewal
Domains are ‘leased’, not owned. If you forget to renew the domain, typically after 2 years, then it gets released back into the domain pool for others to be able to access. There are a couple of outcomes here, none of which are good for your business:
Your website stops generating leads.
As soon as your domain is no longer available, your clients won’t be able to visit the website, so a visiting sales prospect will get an error message and wonder if you are still in business. Your competitors start picking up sales leads that would have otherwise been yours. If you are paying for online advertising, the ads will stop.
Your emails stop.
Yep. Your emails stop working when your domain is not available. This is a serious issue for any business, as emails are the default way to communicate with Clients and Suppliers. You won’t be able to send out email invoices. Enquiries and orders won’t arrive into your inbox. Your business starts grinding to a halt. I think you get the picture: email underpins most small businesses’ communications these days, so take it away, and your business starts to crumble away under you.
You might lose your domain.
Domain stalkers who use ‘drop catch’ systems to be alerted when a domain has recently fallen out of its ‘lease’ and so greedily jump onto these immediately. You might be able to persuade them to hand back your domain, but it won’t come cheap, and in the meantime, your website & emails are offline the entire time.
Loose Google performance
While your website is offline, you immediately start loosing your site’s ‘Google equity’. If you have paid for SEO services, you’ll understand how much that is costing you.
I hope you are now convinced that allowing your domain to expire is extremely damaging to your business.
Top Priority: Check Google Reviews
OK so it’s not a website maintenance thing, but checking your online reviews is extremely important for a modern business.
Negative Reviews
If you’ve received a negative review you need to decide what to do about it. Does the review uncover an issue in your business or is unfairly negative or even comment spam. Decide what you need to do to act on it. Remember that reviews feature prominently, so other prospective clients will see this review and your response and make a judgement about how you handled it.
Positive Reviews
If you get a positive review, then bathe in the glory for just a minute, then respond to thank the reviewer.
Identify and Repair Broken Links
If visitors can’t find what they want in your website, they are less likely to become Customers. Apart from clumsy layout and/or navigation, people can’t find what they are looking for because when they click on a link, it doesn’t work. These ‘broken links’ can easily occur as you work with website edits etc
Fortunately, there are some great WordPress plugins available that monitor and alert you to ‘broken links’. Alternatively, you could try the Broken Link Check website.
Prevent bad customer experiences on your website by ensuring you minimise broken links.
An online marketer with deep experience in Sales & Marketing as well as technical skills accumulated over the many years of working in this industry. He has been knee-deep in websites and online marketing since the mid 80’s.
Peter is a lateral thinker who sees solutions where many don’t.
Website Concierge is a reincarnate of Succinct Ideas, providing quality website support and online marketing for small businesses.
If you found something in my site useful, I’d really appreciate if you could link to the page and maybe Google will help other people who need the same info find the page as well 😉
