Website Maintenance Checklist to Avoid Technical Glitches

Why website maintenance is important?

Maintenance is important for websites because it helps keep them up-to-date, improves their appearance, and enhances usability.

Regularly maintaining your website will help improve its appearance by keeping it free of broken links, out-of-date content, old/obsolete images, and continual server errors. Maintenance also ensures that search engine crawlers continue to identify new or recently updated content, which maintains a site’s ranking in web results. Furthermore, regularly updating your website with current news and events makes your company appear more dynamic and innovative than companies that do not update their websites or take an active interest in social media. Additionally, regular maintenance means you’ll be able to quickly fix any problems when they crop up, rather than let the issues fester and potentially damage your site’s credibility.

If you’re running a website, or if you know someone who is, or you personally run one and would like to make sure it doesn’t go down, here’s how:

1. Check your site’s load speed

You could be making people click back and forth every few seconds because the site takes too long to load. Although good content and excellent products will do much for your business (and loyalty), having a poor load speed can drive them away before they even get to the information that would interest them. When this happens, your traffic actually declines, and it can happen quickly; for example, in no time at all, we noticed Google Analytics reporting a 40% drop in page views when our website had some technical difficulties due to our hosting provider.

There are many free services out there today which offer website analysis tools such as PageSpeed Insights and WebPageTest. These give valuable data on how fast your website is loading. If you notice that the site is slow, it may require a more thorough analysis by a professional web developer.

2. Fix broken links and 404 errors

404 errors are a bad experience for users and can also cause a drop in traffic on your site, as well as a potential loss of goodwill. If you have a business model that depends on clicks from visitors to your website, this type of error could cost you money. Not only do the broken links annoy visitors, but it sends bad signals to search engines about the quality of your site’s content and structure, which is not something you want as an online entrepreneur. This also leads to harming your SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Link checkers are given away for free online and they do their job very well. Run through all of your links and pages to see if any of them have become invalid or have been moved to a new location on the site. Once again, this tool comes in extremely useful when scanning thousands of links at once: http://validator.w3.org/checklink

3. Optimize the site’s database

A website can work on two levels to pull data from a database, either manually or automatically. Automatic updates are more popular because they allow for instant access to new content without an update on the site’s end. This is not only convenient but it keeps things fresh and interesting on your website, which encourages visitors to keep coming back for more. A handy plugin that makes this type of setup very simple is WP-AutoPost, which will allow you to set up automatic posts based on keywords in your comments section – just another novel way to keep people interested!

Back your website up before beginning. Database optimization is not always an easy task and requires specific knowledge of how this works under the hood. It may be a good idea to hire a professional for this job, especially if it is a complex site and there is no one on your team who has the necessary skills and experience. One thing that can help speed up WordPress websites is optimizing tables in MySQL: http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php#Increasing_the_MySQL_table_cache

4. Make technical updates

Updating WordPress is recommended every 3 months, with larger updates for new versions happening every 6 months. When you update WordPress, you are making sure that there are no security issues for your user base; this will also make updates easier on yourself in the future when more of WordPress’ framework is changed by developers.

You should also take care of other technical aspects like making back-ups for all files (including database backup). Update plugins, themes and make sure to upgrade the WordPress version running on the site before performing actions like deleting or moving files, etc.,

5. Freshen up your website content

The content on your website should be kept fresh so that users always have something new to discover while visiting your site. If they are using their news feed to discover new content, then you don’t want to disappoint them or leave them with outdated information.

Before you start updating, please make sure that your content is fresh and relevant. If necessary, update your website with new information to keep it interesting for both search engines and visitors.

6. Update plugins and themes to current versions 

If you have any plugins or themes that haven’t been updated in over two years, chances are they don’t work with the current version of WordPress. Check for plugin updates and check the developer site for theme updates: http://codex.wordpress.org/Update_My_Plugin http://codex.wordpress.org/Update_All_Plugins

Many websites run outdated versions of various plugins. Some users might not be aware that their versions are old which may cause errors, inefficiencies, or even security vulnerabilities. Check this by logging in to your WordPress admin panel and clicking on the ‘Plugin’ section in the ‘Installed Plugins’ tab. Update all the plugins you have installed on your site if their latest versions are available.

7. Upgrade to the latest version of WordPress

This is a no-brainer! Make sure everyone on your team has access to the WP admin area, download a fresh copy of new WordPress, install it on a local testing site, make some changes and if everything looks good go ahead and update your live site.

Keeping up with the latest version is essential for security reasons. It’s dangerous to stay with an old one because outdated software is vulnerable to hackers attacks who regularly exploit known bugs against older versions of WordPress, so it’s better not to take the risk. 

8. Test your website forms

The internet is a huge global network and, unfortunately, not all companies are honest. Because of this, it’s important to keep your website updated and running smoothly to make sure you aren’t the next victim of a scam. If hackers successfully break into your forms and steal information from them, you’re going to need to fix that problem in order for your customers to feel safe using your website again.

Besides keeping up with security issues, regular maintenance also serves as a preventative measure in case there’s an issue with performance or functionality in the future. By regularly checking these issues when they arise instead of waiting until you have thousands of customers getting angry at you can help save time and money when trying to resolve them with key features such as checkout processes and lead collection forms.

Conclusion

Keeping up with maintenance is one way of showing visitors that they are welcome and that the website is worth returning to.

By keeping your site updated, you can avoid unnecessary technical glitches and ensure everything is running smoothly for your visitors. Wishing everyone a happy holiday season!

Have you been looking for a web design company that will take your business’s online presence from the ground up? If so, look no further than Pixel Street Web Design. With our help and experience in developing websites of all shapes (and sizes), we are confident about what can be achieved with new technology!

Khurshid Alam
Khurshid Alam

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