Webmasters Website Maintenance Checklist
Introduction
Have you thought of a website maintenance checklist?
If not, Your website is similar to a plant — if you want it to thrive, you must nurture it. If you do not maintain your website, it will wither.
Although you cannot provide food, water, or sunlight to your website, there are other tasks you can perform to aid in its continued development. We’ve built a comprehensive website maintenance checklist that you can use to keep your site healthy.
Alright, here we go!
- Checklist for weekly maintenance
- Checklist for monthly maintenance
- Checklist for quarterly maintenance
Weekly maintenance
The first section of this website maintenance plan will discuss activities you should complete weekly to ensure your site’s essential functions operate optimally.
Fix broken links
Our web page checklist begins with the correction of broken links on your site. When you create content for your web pages, you include links to other websites and pages on your site. Not only do these links assist you in providing useful information to your audience on specific subjects, but they also assist search engines such as Google indexing your content.
However, if you have broken links, Google will be unable to index those pages, and users will be unable to view them.
Because this is a critical issue for your business, you should review your website’s links weekly. You may use a tool such as Google Search Console to assist you in determining which links on your site are broken. Once you’ve identified the broken ties, you can repair them by following these steps:
- Verifying that the link does not contain any typos or spelling errors
- Establishing redirects to the new page on your web where the material has been relocated
- Substituting a different page for the link
Update software or plugins (For site builders only)
If you’re using a site builder such as WordPress or Squarespace, you’ll want to add the following task to your weekly website maintenance checklist: update software or plugins.
These website builders often release updates to their platforms. For example, many of the plugins you use with WordPress would need updates as the developers continue to refine them. Therefore, to ensure that your site runs properly, you can update your program or plugins weekly.
Each week, verify that you have the most recent version of whatever software you’re using. After updating, check that your site continues to run normally and was not adversely affected by the update.
This move is critical when updating plugins. Certain changes can affect the stability of your plugins, so you must monitor your site’s functionality and ensure that everything works properly.
Are your forms working?
The final item on this weekly website checklist is to focus on your forms. Forms are an integral part of your website because they enable you to collect leads for your company. As a result, you must review your forms weekly to ensure they are functioning properly.
Submit information to your forms and conduct a test to determine whether you can complete the process on your own and if you can type all of the necessary details into the boxes and submit them. Additionally, you’ll want to evaluate the form’s user interface to ensure that it’s quick and straightforward for your audience to complete.
Additionally, you’ll want to verify the phase that occurs after you send the form, whether it’s signing up for an event or entering an email list, to ensure that it works properly as well. Individuals can send their information through your web page form but will not receive a follow-up welcome email or discount coupon.
Analyze your form submission process to ensure that your website is effectively generating leads for your company.
Monthly maintenance
The first item on your monthly website checklist should be a performance audit. You’ll want to review the pages on your web to determine if they’re generating the desired results.
You can gain insight into your website’s success by using a tool such as Google Analytics. You’ll want to examine your company’s most critical sites, such as product pages, service pages, and contact pages, to ensure they’re generating leads and sales.
- Keep an eye out for exceptionally high bounce rates.
- Examine the conversion rate, targets, and other metrics for a decrease.
- Examine the web pages for odd spikes.
For pages with a high bounce rate or a drop in conversion results, you’ll need to analyze to decide why your audience is leaving or not converting.
If you see unusual spikes on your web page, you’ll want to investigate what caused them and whether you can use them to help boost traffic to your blog.
Test site speed
Testing your site’s load time is the next thing on your monthly website maintenance checklist. The load time of your web page is vital to its success, as users do not want to wait for slow-loading websites. Indeed, users anticipate your site to load in less than two seconds.
Therefore, you can review your site’s load time monthly to ensure that it loads quickly for your audience. You can check your site’s current load time using a web tool.
If your site isn’t loading fast enough, you can examine Google’s recommendations for improvement. Several methods for speeding up the loading of a websites include the following:
- Redirects reduction
- Enable caching in the browser
- reducing the size of image files
- Limit HTTP request
If you operate an e-commerce company, this section of the monthly website maintenance checklist is important. Take the time to review the checkout process to ensure a great customer experience.
This move is critical if you examine your site’s metrics and see a decline in conversions.
Prove that you can complete the order by going through the checkout process yourself. Take note of any difficulties or issues you encountered while attempting to check out. Chances are if you encounter points of annoyance during the process, your audience may as well.
Through conducting a monthly analysis of your checkout process, you will maintain a smooth shopping experience and continuously enhance your customers’ experience.
Make a backup of your website’s data
The following step in your website maintenance plan is to create a backup of your site’s data. You have a lot of data on your server, and you need to back it up to avoid losing it and having to restore your site’s pages.
There are hundreds of online backup services available for your site’s files and database.
Depending on how often you update your site, you may want to backup your data weekly.
Quarterly maintenance
The first item on your quarterly website checklist should be the accessibility of your web pages. You’ll want to do an analysis of your site’s current configuration to ensure that you’re providing the best experience possible for your audience.
- The specification and positioning of call-to-action buttons (CTA)
- Design style
- Page formats
Update web page content
Following that, we’ll look at updating your web page content as part of this website maintenance plan. Your web page content is critical in retaining visitors and convincing them to purchase your items. However, as time passes, you can discover that some of the content you previously produced is out of date.
Therefore, you’ll want to go through your web pages every quarter and check for any out-of-date material. Whether it’s blog posts, resource sites, or product descriptions, you want to ensure that the information you provide is correct.
Once you’ve created a list of pages that need updating or reoptimization, you may schedule their updates.
Have you tested other browsers?
The final item on this quarterly maintenance checklist is to perform a browser test of your web pages. Browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are frequently updated. Occasionally, these changes can have an impact on how users perceive your web.
You can test your web pages in each of these browsers to ensure it provides an optimal user experience. If your site is not compliant with the latest browser updates, you may need to tweak it to look nice on these browsers.
Additionally
Consumers browse the web on a variety of devices, including computers, tablets, smartphones, and even foldable smartphones. (Tip) Your browsers have tools for testing these devices function properly with your webpage.
So are you feeling overwhelmed
By the amount of work required to maintain your web pages after viewing this website maintenance plan? If you lack the time necessary to maintain your web pages, have no fear! Oahu Webmasters provides website services that will simplify your life.
If you have any questions, please use this connection to contact us.
