- November 20, 2018
- Posted by: Support Team
- Category: Blog
WEBSITE MAINTENANCE
- Is the act of regularly checking your website for issues and mistakes and keeping it updated and relevant. This should be done on a consistent basis in order to keep your website healthy, encourage continued traffic growth, and strengthen your SEO and Google rankings.
- Is performing all the tasks necessary to keep a website up to date and in good, working order so that it works and shows up correctly with the latest web browsers and mobile devices.
Examples of Activities Carried out in Web site Maintenance
- Changing website content that is; text, images, PDF files, calendar events, etc.
- Modify and optimizing pages and your website design so that they rank higher with search engines
- Redesigning a header or website banner
- Testing that the website works well with the latest web browsers / mobile devices
- Upgrading website software
- Checking website error logs
- Reporting website rankings and statistics
- Troubleshooting why pages don’t work or why certain things don’t line up
- Testing forms
- Cleaning up old files
- Formatting and sending a monthly e-newsletter and so on
Note:
Regular visitors are looking for what is new, so provide them with new and exciting information, products or features.
Website are subject to being hacked. Using a proper website maintenance program you can try and avoid being hacked by keeping everything up to date.
Who is Web Maintenance For?
Small to medium sized companies who do not have staff to do maintenance tasks on their website are perfect candidates for this service. Working on their website is not a part of daily operations as they need to tend to running their business. Taking the time to learn how to do website design and maintenance properly is not a good investment in time as they need their staff to work on other things. They can instead hand the work off to a team of experts with a wide range of knowledge.
Larger sized businesses may also benefit from hiring out website maintenance because then the work doesn’t sit at the bottom of the IT Department’s to-do list. The work is done professionally and up to standards, quickly so that the website and business benefit.
It’s also for organizations and non-profits.https://webhostingkings.com/web-design-in-Kenya.php
The Importance of Website Maintenance
1. Customer Interest
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A well-maintained website attracts new customers and maintains the interest levels of existing customers. Your website should be customer centered and kept relevant by routinely refreshing the content and ensuring that customer contact points are in good working order. Routinely check that contact forms work, address and phone number listings are updated and products, services and price lists are current and correct.
2. Troubleshooting Issues
As a business owner, having your website down means a potential loss of clients. For those who simply buy a website without website maintenance, any sudden issues with the website must be handled separately, and typically billed separately. This means calling up your host and figuring why the website is down, trying to go in and troubleshoot the issue yourself, or waiting on the phone while customer service goes down their dialogue tree to walk you through the issue.
3. Security Updates
One of the most important parts of website maintenance is keeping your website secure. Websites, especially those built on content management system such as word press, have a lot of moving parts. From themes to plugins to installed website security updates are often made to patch security exploits. If your website is left with outdated systems, it is left vulnerable to active hackers, as well as malware and viruses.
4. Updating Plugins and Integrations
Like with security concerns, these same plugins and integrations that run on your website are constantly being updating to improve functionality and reduce issues and errors. Leaving these systems un-updated means missing out on improved features and user experience at best, and at worst can cause these parts of your website to fail, which can result in part of your website breaking or the entire website going down.
5. Changes to Your Website
Need to change a phone number, update your staff section, or even add a new line of products? Without a maintenance contract, you’re either going to have to put on the web developer hat yourself or sign another contract for the project.
6. Keeping Up with Best Practices
The internet is a changing place, and so are the best practices that social media, search engines, and other websites employ. For example, going without SSl (secure Socket layer) can affect how people view and find your website. SSL is a great thing to have on your website, but isn’t a user-friendly installation, and if managed correctly, the labor can be covered under a standard maintenance contract
7. Search Engines
Website maintenance is critical to search-engine rankings. Websites with old content rank lower in search engine listings. Some search engines, including Google, check your page’s “if-modified-since” HTTP header to determine whether it is worth crawling. Failing to make frequent modifications could cause you to be pushed below active competitors in the listings and cost you business over time.
8. Corporate Image
Your website is a public reflection of your corporate image. A poorly maintained website with lots of errors, broken links, dead pages and outdated information projects a sloppy corporate image and can cause business to decline over time. Routinely examine the look and feel of your website and update it to match your corporate image. Check and fix broken links, poor grammar and spelling mistakes as quickly as possible preferably before a customer brings them to your attention.
9. Considerations
Your website-maintenance activities need to cover some business-critical key areas. These include copy production, quality control, publishing, feedback monitoring, performance monitoring, infrastructure maintenance, routine maintenance, change control and risk control. For risk management, you need to have a business-continuity plan in place for your website and ensure that your hosting service provider has a backup and maintenance plan that is in line with your own business service levels, especially if you have a real-time or mission-critical website.
There are all kinds of things that need to be done when maintaining a website. Whether you decide to do these yourself or hire out the work, it still needs to be done.
10. Feature Addition
If at the time you created the website there was something that got left out because of budget constraints, maybe the budget can afford it now? Take a look at your website/blog every once in a while and see if there is some kind of improvement that can be made. Something that you didn’t think of previously.
Maybe you have some feed back from visitors that needs to be implemented?
- Fix a usability issue that has been mentioned.
- Time to add a blog if you have a regular website and do not have one already?
- Did you join a social networking site or two? Add the appropriate button(s) and links to your social profiles.
- Add a frequently asked question section to cut down on emails and phone calls aske these regular questions.
Regular Website Maintenance Tasks
There are some regular website maintenance tasks you should perform on a scheduled basis. Scheduling at least monthly would be the timeline to start with.
1. Backing Up Your Website
Is something you should do all the time, especially if you are the type that uses the online interface of your store or blog to make changes. If the server crashes for some reason or your site gets hacked, your edits will be gone if the web hosting company restores what they had backed up. Image loosing a whole day’s work, just because you didn’t take a few minutes to backup the site.
2. Monitor Website Outages
If your site goes down, you want to be the first to know and not receive an email from someone else they can not access your site. SiteUp is a small program that runs on your computer in the background checking your site on a regular basis. It will notify you when the site is down with a popup. Obviously though, your computer has to be on for it work.