Ongoing Website Maintenance

Website maintenance is an on-going and continuous process. A successful website should be implemented effectively and maintained professionally. Consider the following guidelines when performing ongoing website maintenance.

Ongoing Search Engine Optimisation – Regularly analyze the statistics and data collected about your visitors. This data should show any trends in what keywords people are using in search engines that are bringing them to your website. You should also check your search engine rankings for the keywords you are targeting and make any changes to your marketing techniques as needed.

Add, Remove, or Edit Content – Sometimes you may need to add new pages to your website or remove old content such as special offers that are no longer available. Be sure to take care if you remove whole pages that you don’t create broken links. No one likes to click on a link only to find the content is not there anymore and this can give your website a bad impression. Therefore maintain proper links by regularly checking them. You may also need to edit your content over time to keep up to date with market trends or customer needs.

Site rejuvenation – Visitors have come to expect that websites constantly change so from time to time it may be necessary to give your site a facelift. Sometimes what was trendy a while back quickly becomes out of date so you should change your template or colours to suit your ever changing audience. Your website should always look fresh and appealing in order to attract and retain visitors on a regular basis.

Do repetitive proofreading of all content or text to ensure it is free from grammatical and spelling errors. Poor spelling and sloppy grammar can quickly turn visitors off purchasing any of your services because they may get the impression that since you don’t take care on your website that your services or products may be of lesser quality too.

Frequently test how long it takes your website pages to load. If it takes too long visitors might go to another website. Keep it simple yet eye-catching and limit the number of large images. Also keep in mind users on slow broadband or dial up connections.

Regularly check the functionality of your website. Make sure your features are useful and remove anything that doesn’t add value to your website.  When testing your site it can be helpful to ask someone else to browse the site pretending to be a new user. Be sure to test your site often and from a range of perspectives. Make adjustments whenever necessary.

Set up a system of website backups. If you website uses a database, consider setting up an automated nightly or weekly backup of all your data. Also download a complete copy of your entire website and keep it in a safe location.