How to Perform Website Maintenance: Tips and Tricks
When your website is first launched, it’s exciting and you have a lot of ideas on where to take it next. You may have even developed some short-term goals for what you want the site to achieve in the coming months. But that’s often where things end. After all, launching a website is a huge undertaking, so there’s little time left to think about maintenance. That is…until something goes wrong and users start complaining about broken links, images coming up as broken files or other issues that make your website almost unusable. At this point, many businesses begin panicking and rush out an apology with a promise to fix everything as soon as possible. However, these are easily avoidable problems that can be fixed with some simple Website Maintenance procedures. Whether you need to improve the look and feel of your site or keep tabs on new content regularly, there are several things you should consider setting up so that you don’t have to think about them again in the future. Here are the most important tasks:
Check for Broken Links and Redirection
You will find that your site is a living document that regularly changes. New pages may be added, others will be updated, and some may be deleted completely. When this happens, ensure that you update the links to reflect the changes. Also, if a page has been deleted, ensure that the pages that link to it have also been updated so they take visitors to the correct information. When a page is deleted, the links to this page will, quite understandably, not work. There could be many links to it and updating them all can be problematic. An easy solution is to add a “redirection” rule so that the deleted page simply redirects to the correct page.
Repair or Delete Broken Images
Images are a crucial part of any website. They can be used for a variety of different purposes; from blog posts to advertisements, and even for providing examples or product shots. What’s more, most people are visual creatures and are likely to remember and respond better to visuals than text alone. However, like all things (digital or otherwise), things break and images may become corrupted, broken or even deleted completely. When this happens, the image will show up as a broken file, which typically results in the following error message on the website: “File not found”. Depending on the severity of the problem, your website visitors may only receive a broken image icon, or they may have an error message that reads “Error: This file does not exist or is not allowed to be displayed in this manner”. Ideally, any images that are on your site should be maintained so that broken images are extremely rare. However, if it does happen, you should replace or remove the missing image from the page as soon as possible so that your site stays clean and functional.
Maintain a Calendar of Content
Your website is a representation of your business and what you as a business owner or manager are trying to achieve with it. To maintain that level of confidence and reliability your website must be up to date with fresh content. Whether you have a dedicated blog or a section on your homepage with “latest posts”, you should have a calendar set up so that you can plan your posts in advance. If you don’t have the time to write posts, you can use a service like Bloggers Wanted to hire exceptional guest bloggers. What’s more, you should also consider creating a Google Calendar for your website so that you can keep track of important dates and events. For example, if your website is a travel website, you might want to mark the various “peak seasons” for travel, or if you are a real estate brokerage, you may want to mark the important closing dates for real estate sales.
Maintain a Watchlist of Keywords and Terms
You may not be able to control the terms people use when searching for products or services, but you can control how you respond to those terms with your website. With this in mind, you should create a watchlist of important keywords and terms that relate to your business and services so that you can monitor their use and response. This will allow you to stay ahead of the curve and make sure that you are responding to the needs of your customers. If you have a blog, you can use a keyword analysis tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs to monitor the frequency that your chosen keywords are being used. You can also use these tools to determine the monthly search volume for each keyword and select the most appropriate ones to use in your blog posts.
Automated Website Tasks
While it’s important to keep an eye on your website and respond to issues as they arise, you can also take steps to avoid certain issues before they happen. For example, you can set up content crawlers to monitor for broken links and images, as well as using a content management system (CMS) to respond to broken links and images automatically when they are detected. You can also set up Google Alerts for your business name and key personnel so that you can stay on top of any Internet-based news that could impact your business. Additionally, you can use social media management tools like Hootsuite or Sprout Social to help you manage your social media accounts in one place so that you aren’t getting overwhelmed by notifications.
Conclusion
Website Maintenance isn’t glamorous, and it’s often a tedious task that is put at the bottom of many business owners’ “to-do” list. However, it’s vital that website owners understand the importance of Website Maintenance and make time for it in their daily or weekly schedule. This way, they can ensure that their website is always up-to-date and functioning correctly.
