Having a website or a blog of your own isn’t enough. With it comes plenty of responsibilities and your dedication to keep it running smoothly.
Many people simply choose to upload a blog or a website and forget about it. That’s not all – you will find several bloggers who start a blog with great enthusiasm, post for a few days and then it’s all forgotten. Do you think it helps? No
If you are serious about your work, you need to work hard for it. Regular website maintenance is a necessity and not an option. There is no use complaining about falling traffic, poor website visibility or even no blog views, when you are not working hard on it. Thus, as you plan to have your own website, remember it comes with an added responsibility of updating it or else it is of no value.
Necessity of Website Maintenance
There are many reasons why website maintenance is vital for the success or performance of your website. With regular maintenance, you are assured that your site shall run smoothly. You will not receive any complaints about broken links or site lacking the latest updates or page errors. If you expect regular visitors, you need to give them reasons for visiting your website. Besides, a website which is not properly maintained is at a security risk. It can be hacked and data stolen as well.
Website Updates – Suppose you visit a site which is not updated with the latest news or information. Would you bother to visit it again?
Updating Website Content
One of the easiest ways of website maintenance is through website content update. You can update anything – it might be in the form of additional text, videos, free downloads or images. It has to be anything which draws the interest of your visitors.
- Product Information Updates – You can add new products, you can add images, change the description of products or simple delete products.
- Discontinue Updates – Just as you would announce the update of products, you can also announce the discontinuance of products as well.
- Note on Price Changes – You can announce discounts or price changes which can even invite some rush purchases as well.
- Company News – You can update your website with some news about your company. You can even announce and introduce new members in your team.
- Giveaways – Blog giveaways attract a lot of views. One good way to update your website is by announcing giveaways.
Adding Features to Your Website
It is possible that when you created the website you missed out something. It might be due to budget constraints at that time but something which you can afford now. Keep checking your website to see if there is anything which you can improve. If you cannot find any improvement areas, why not ask your visitors.
- There might be some usability issues which need to be fixed.
- You can simply add a blog section if your site doesn’t have one.
- You might choose to add social navigation buttons if you didn’t have them.
- You can even add an FAQ section of you didn’t have one.
Besides this, there are a few regular website maintenance tasks which can be considered as well.
- Monitoring Outages – Keep a track of when your site is going down. It is always good to be aware of a slowdown or outage yourself than from knowing it from someone else. SiteUp is one program which runs in the background and keep a check on your site on regular basis. It notifies the user when the site is down.
- Keep Checking the Website Speed – A slow loading website can cause immense harm to the SEO of your website. You need to keep testing the download speed of your website often. This is especially needed when you have added a new feature.
- Backing Up Your Site – This is one task which should be done often. Though web hosting companies mention that they backup the sites, you can do your bit as well. Think about what will happen if your site is hacked or in case the server crashes.
- Keep Checking The Links – Broken links are not good for the SEO of your website. Keep checking for all broken links time and again.
- Software Updates – Third party software like WordPress keep updating time and again. You need to keep a track of all such updates and update your site as soon as they come out. Such updates are not just new features but they are also security updates.
- Site Analysis – Remember you shouldn’t be just analyzing your sales stats but also your website stats from time to time.
These were some of the many things which you can do to properly maintain your website.
