Regular Website Maintenance Tasks for Optimized Performance
A website is created with a vision to provide facilities to customers, clients, and audiences. Regular website maintenance is crucial for achieving this vision. This task ensures your website is up and running at all times.
Did you know it takes 50 milliseconds (i.e., less than 1 second) for a user to decide whether to stay on a website or leave? A website acts as the first impression for its user.
If you want to leave a positive impression on the site users, want them to stay and come back again, then you should pay attention to regular website maintenance.
Website maintenance is mainly based on a checklist that ensures a website is in its best form, i.e., quickly accessible, informative, secured, and navigating properly.
Once your website is launched, it’s essential to keep up the web maintenance tasks to ensure you offer its users an optimal experience.
Let’s understand regular website maintenance, its importance, and tasks to improve website performance.
What is website maintenance?
Website Maintenance refers to regularly checking the website for any issue, fixing the issue, and making the update to provide the best user experience.
Once you create your website, it becomes your responsibility to monitor it for different activities like user engagement, traffic, search engine ranking, etc. Analysing the site responses encourages the site owner to modify the important site features to improve its visibility or popularity among users.
Importance of Regular Website Maintenance
Your website isn’t only a medium to share information about your business products and services, it’s also required to build the brand image and get customer reviews and feedback.
Thinking of a website as a one-time task is entirely wrong. It’s a progressive work for a lifetime.
It requires regular updates and routine maintenance so the site can continue to run at its full capacity.
Here are the main reasons that explain why performing website maintenance is important.
It Enhances the User’s Experience:
The ultimate goal of every business is happy and satisfied customers!
This goal can be achieved by meeting customers’ expectations. Regularly updating your site content, like upcoming events, blogs, and images leaves a positive impression on your visitors.
Also, these updates give better insights about your company, work, and services to the user.
A well-informed website improves its visibility and promotes your brand. Through regular maintenance tasks, remove the old content, check errors, and update fresh content.
Doing this regularly reflects that you care about your site and its visitors, which will certainly lead to a positive user experience.
It Improves Accessibility of the Website:
Keeping a check if your website is properly accessible on common platforms is essential. In today’s time, around 90% of the total global international population uses mobile phones, so make sure your website is mobile-friendly.
If the business website is not mobile-friendly or has unresolved bugs, the business may experience a decrease in the number of users.
Regular site maintenance helps to find out any issue with any site interface and fix it on time. Performing this helps to keep the site up and running on all supporting platforms.
It Helps With SEO:
Customers, clients, or an audience are the whole idea of establishing a company. To encourage people to visit your website, you must maintain it updated on a regular basis.
Google is always on the lookout for websites that offer the most relevant and up-to-date information on their search engine results page. If your website hasn’t been updated in a long time, it might be de-indexed entirely or given a serious penalty. To rank well in search results, you must maintain your website up to date with current content.
Regularly performing website maintenance is critical for SEO.
It Keeps Website Security Features Updated:
Performing regular site checks helps you stay on top of the software update, security update, and other maintenance tasks that promote the health and security of the website.
Not paying attention to the site security features invite hackers to steal the data as well as that of your customers.
Elimination of these security concerns is possible by ensuring SSL certificates are functioning properly and other security measures are maintained.
Regular Website Maintenance Tasks to Improve Performance
A website evolves and continuously performs when the following tasks are used to monitor different activities.
Keeping Website Pages Up-To-Date.
Web pages provide most of the business information to their users. Thus, it’s essential to keep all the content and images on pages like bio, contact detail, products, services, awards updated.
Also, when uploading the fresh content on your website, the site owner should check the website load time, as it may vary. The website load time should be accurate, as studies show more than 60% of users leave the website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Regularly updating content, sharing informative blogs/articles on the website encourage users to revisit.
Taking Regular Backup of The Website:
Losing the website data or crashing the website doesn’t happen very often, but it can be a massive loss for you when it does. So, keeping the website’s backup is of utmost essential.
You can keep a copy of your website store somewhere other than the server where it is hosted. Taking regular backup of your website means valuing your efforts.
Check For Website Security Features and Update Passwords:
Website security is another essential factor for having a successful and optimised website. Sites with poor security functions are the easy target for a spammer. Ensure your website security features are updated, so you can keep your site safe from any malicious activity.
It can be done by simply changing the passwords of important accounts like backend, hosting, and domain providers.
Website Analytics:
Google Analytics or the software you rely upon gives you the appropriate view of your site performance. It tells you how well your site connects with the target audience. Important statistics to consider the performance are the average number of visitors per day, page views, how long people stay on your site and click-through rate.
Checking analytics regularly will guide you to work upon your website to make it better every day for its visitors and improve the website search ranking.
Review All the Links:
Test your website links periodically to ensure they navigate the user properly. It’s essential to fix all the dead links that give the 404 errors on a priority basis. So, the user doesn’t feel disappointed. You can find good SEO tools through Google search to find such dead links and use them.
Incorporate Social Media Channels:
Usually, a customer uses social media channels to ensure brand reliability or know more about the business.
Spending some time on the business’s social media pages, updating their information regularly like sharing the recent offers, achievements, and customer reviews help draw more people’s attention.
Also, adding, the ‘Share This’ button around published content on the site is helpful for direct engagement. Having website pages on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter can connect you with the relevant audience.
In conclusion
A website is a lifetime companion of a business, so it is indeed crucial. While an updated website can get you good leads and a high ranking, a poor functioning website may cause a lot of harm.
No one wants to waste their entire efforts that led to developing a website. Following regular maintenance tasks can keep a website up and running all the time.
Hopefully, this post has guided you towards performing website maintenance. You can also contact BigRock to know more about the tools that help monitor the website performance.
