What Is Website Maintenance?

Website maintenance is the act of regularly checking your website for problems and mistakes, and keeping it updated and relevant. This should be done regularly to keep your website healthy, encourage continued traffic growth and strengthen your SEO and Google rankings. 

Maintaining your website is very important to companies, big or small, in order to engage and retain customers. It’s simple for businesses, especially startups, to cut corners and let some tasks slide. Website maintenance can be one of those things as it doesn’t always present immediate problems. But, just like your health can fall apart if you don’t regularly go for check up, so can the health of your website.

Monitoring your website regularly is a must to keep your business running smoothly.

What Are the Steps in Website Maintenance? 

There is a long list of tasks that you should do to keep your website running smoothly. The most time-sensitive of these are website security updates and patches. Without these, your website is vulnerable to hackers.

With that in mind, here is a list of website maintenance tasks that should be completed regularly:

To be done weekly

1. Check that all of your pages are loading without errors
2. Run a backup and make sure a previous version of your site is stored
3. Make updates to website software and plugins
4. Check that all of your forms are running properly
5. Remove any spam comments from pages and posts
6. Check your pages to see if there are any broken links
7. Search for 404 errors and fix or redirect
8. Write one or more blog posts to keep your community engaged and encourage SEO traffic.

To be done monthly

1. Check the load speed of your website and ensure that nothing is bogging it down
2. Review your security scans and make sure nothing is out of place
3. Analyze website statistics from the previous month
4. Check your blog to see if there are any articles that could be updated

To be done quarterly

1. Review your website design and structure  – can be it improved?
2. Check graphics and images – should anything be updated?
3. Review SEO and meta titles and descriptions to ensure they are as effective as possible
4. Test and tweak popups, forms, and calls to action
5. Review your workload for efficiencies to see if anything can be automated
6. Test your website on all devices and browsers to see if it displays correctly
7. Review advertising and marketing campaigns to see if anything needs to be changed or updated.
8. Restore a previous version of the website to check your backup health

To be done yearly

1. Update any reference to the current year
2. Review each page for content accuracy, grammar, typos, and relevancy
3. Check any active email addresses and see if any are excessive and can be deleted
4. Ensure that your website domain name is renewed
5. Consider whether a website design update is due
6. Review all of your top performing blog articles and see if they can be updated with new content

A Proper Website Maintenance Plan Is a Circle

As you can see from our checklist, you should regularly maintain your website. It grows on itself, and if not properly implemented, may cause some serious problems and setbacks to your potential growth and business health.

Staying on top of website health takes awareness and organization. This is usually the case for a large website with has a lot of pages.

With the introduction of latest tools to make website development easier, website sizes are growing each year. Although it is easy to add pages to most websites, it’s not easy to maintain all of your pages in a good state.

All that to say: keep on top of your website maintenance.

Why Is It Important to Do Website Maintenance?

Many new businesses already have a lot on their plates without thinking too much about regularly checking in on their website. It is appealing to buy a domain name, throw up something temporary and just think about it later. There are a lot of reasons why it is not a good idea. Maintaining a current, healthy and active website is important.

SEO

The whole purpose of starting a business is to have customers, clients or an audience. To bring traffic to your website, you have to regularly update it.

Google wants to rank websites that has the most relevant and up-to-date information on their search engine results page. They may even de-index your whole website if it is not updated regularly enough and if they think it has been infected by malware. You must regularly update your website with current content, news, keywords and articles in order to rank well in search results.

Regularly website maintenance is invaluable for SEO strategy.

Customer Attraction/Engagement

If your website is gaining traction and traffic, it is essential to keep those potential customers. If they weren’t able to find what they are searching for, current information and relevant content, there is a big chance you will lose interest quickly. In order for your website to be a useful tool, you need to make sure it is free from typos and grammar issues, it has all the information a customer may want and looks engaging and consistent.

Security

This is the most significant reason to keep website maintenance on your radar, especially if your website is storing customer information. If you’re making use of a website building platform like WordPress or Wix, you must make sure that you are installing regular software updates and security patches. It can be simple and attractive for hackers to find and target websites that have sat dormant for so long.

Corporate Image

It is becoming more easy to build a website that looks well-designed and professional. There is an expectation for a professional website from professional companies. If your website doesn’t deliver on the promise of professionalism, your customers will always leave your website and go elsewhere. 

Keep up with Trends in Design and Technology

The smoother your website is, the more you can convince potential customers that you are their ultimate choice. If you’re staying on top of your web maintenance, you will also have the opportunity to  be an early adopter of new website technology that will help the back-end run more smoothly. If you regularly install software updates, you’ll be able to take advantage of new features that install along with the updates.

You’ll also be able to tweak your design to stay on top of the latest website looks. It’s more tempting to employ a company with a polished and modern website than one that looks like it hopped on a time travel device from 2003.  

How Much Does Website Maintenance Cost?

There are different cost expectations based on what your website is used for, the size of your audience, and how much content is hosted. We have discussed the different pricing brackets below.

Small Personal Blog

A small blog usually doesn’t have a lot of traffic and has very few needs. This can be hosted on a blogging site like Google Blogger with no costs whatsoever. Or, it may be self-hosted using a platform like WordPress with low monthly costs stemming from domain name renewal and hosting service.

Medium-Large Sized Active Blog with a Wide Audience

If you have a blog that is bringing in an income with an active audience, you would probably want to be self hosted with few customizations. This may need a lot of frequent maintenance, updates, marketing and backups and a larger monetary investment.

Company Website for the Purpose of Marketing Only

Similar to the medium-large size blog, this may have to be self hosted with a simple design template and limited content. It will be low maintenance for upkeep with regular updates, marketing and backups.

Large Customized eCommerce Websites

This will be a bigger financial investment as you’ll have to be vigilant about website maintenance. You’re handling a lot of content, code customization and customer data. If you do not have an IT team on staff, we would suggest finding a web maintenance package to stay on top of your website needs.

Custom Built Web Application

This will be your largest financial investment. Your web application was custom built from the ground up for a particular purpose and it needs to be in top-notch working condition all the time or your company will suffer. This likely needs a dedicated staff of developers keeping a close eye on the maintenance.

Let Us Help You

Here at iFormatLogic I.T. Solutions, we provide reliable and affordable website maintenance packages with no long term contracts. We offer SEO, hosting, security and updates, backups, support, and peace of mind. You don’t have to worry. We’ve got your back.