Regularly updating and maintaining your website is a crucial part of having a successful online presence. It’s easy to think that your job is done once your website is live, but maintaining your website is a whole other ball game. Websites can crash at any time and having someone there to work on a quick recovery is crucial – especially for E-commerce websites. But besides that, who’s going to be formatting and uploading blogs? Who’s going to fix your plugins when they malfunction? And who’s going to make sure that your website is consistently secure and safe from being hacked? – That’s why website maintenance is so crucial.
Always Backup Your Site
When managing a website, it’s important to always backup your database. This removes the possibility of accidentally losing your hard work when updating the website. If there were ever to be a security breach of your data, hackers could easily gather important information and may alter parts of the code whilst doing so. Therefore, using a backup system ensures that you can easily restore your website to previous versions and limit your downtime, saving you the time and money of having to rebuild parts of the site again.
Keep Plugins and Themes Up To Date
When using a website builder such as WordPress, it’s important to keep plugins and themes up to date in order to ensure that everything on your website runs smoothly. Developers of these plugins are constantly updating their code to improve the system they have created, and failure to keep up with this can cause security issues and leave your site open to attack. Additionally, the website can start to run slowly and you may notice that certain sections are no longer working as they used to. To prevent these problems, it may be useful to set up automatic updates on your website and set aside a certain date each month to check whether any updates need to be made manually. This can be a relatively quick and simple task which may end up saving you a lot of trouble in the future.
Prioritise Uptime
Prioritising uptime means that you know the importance of keeping your website running smoothly to allow users to access it whenever they like. Website uptime is the time that your website is available to users in a specific period, so if this is low, you may see a dramatic decrease in business. Visitors may simply choose to click off your website and seek the service of your competitors if they notice that your website is no longer up and running properly. This can result in a loss of revenue, as well as potentially hindering your business’s reputation and preventing customers from wanting to access your website again.
Monitor Analytics
A successful website is often one that is meticulously monitored to ensure that it continues to grow in a variety of different ways. The process of collecting and analysing data allows you to see what’s working and what can be improved, giving you an idea of the tasks that should be focused on primarily. Comparing monthly reports can allow you to clearly see the trends that are taking place within your website – for example, you may notice more visitors at a certain time of day and could therefore tailor your marketing strategy accordingly. You can even create targeted content depending on the demographics and interests of your visitors, which may lead to them spreading the word about the service you are offering and drawing in others who are also interested in a similar thing.
Remove Unused Plugins
Unused plugins can take up lots of valuable space on your website, often leading to lower load times and consequently, unhappy visitors. Not only do they clutter up your dashboard, but they can lead to a multitude of problems in the future. Believe it or not, inactive plugins can cause severe security issues if malicious individuals decide to discover and exploit these. The unused files are the perfect place for hackers to install malware on your site as they are still executable files so to eliminate any possibility of this happening, it’s best to delete anything that isn’t actively in use.
Update Copyright Information in Footer
Finally, to keep your website up to industry standards, you should display your copyright information in the footer of your website and make sure this information is up to date. If you have recently launched your website, it is a possibility that others may take the content you have created and pass it off as their own. A standard copyright notice must contain the following information:
- The copyright symbol ©, or the words “Copyright” or “Copr.”
- The year of publication
- The name of the copyright owner
Placing this short line at the bottom of your site means that others are not legally allowed to use your content without permission. During the development process of any of the websites we make here at Sood, we always set our copyright year to auto-update in order to prevent us from having to log in to multiple sites and manually update this each year. You can also implement this within your own website using this method, which is handy if you are also managing more than one site.
The thought of managing and maintaining websites can be daunting – but by following these processes, it’s difficult to go wrong. Creating a checklist of the tasks you need to complete regularly can help you to stay on track.
If you need help with maintaining your website, visit our web support page.