Monthly Website Maintenance Checklist
The Importance of Monthly Maintenance
So you’ve built a website for your small business. It’s up and running, generating a few leads for you every month. That’s all you wanted it to do, so you can forget about it, right?
Well, you can…but you shouldn’t.
One aspect of a website many small businesses fail to consider is ongoing maintenance and updates. Keeping your website up-to-date and fresh is just as important as having one. A stale and vulnerable site isn’t helping your business. I’ve seen sites go completely offline and the client doesn’t know because they aren’t checking in on it. Proper maintenance isn’t only about keeping the website fresh, but making sure no problems arise, and if they do, they are promptly fixed.
Below are the five main reasons for monthly website maintenance. If you can run through this checklist on your website every month, you will be in good shape.
Site Speed
Having a fast site speed is critical to your website performance and a positive user experience. Slow-loading pages can lead to frustrated visitors and high bounce rates (meaning a user leaves your site after visiting one page). All websites should be targeting a page load speed of 3 seconds or less to be within an acceptable range.
It’s important to analyze your website performance every month to ensure other updates made to the website don’t increase your page load speed.
Small businesses can use free tools such as Google’s Page Speed Insights or GTMetrix to monitor how fast their website pages load. These free tools will analyze your site speed, show you the areas of your site that could use improvement and provide recommendations for fixes. It’s not difficult to run a test and know the status of your website performance, but with Page Speed Insights in particular, the results can be a bit overwhelming and get quite technical in nature.
Backing Up Your Website
At the very minimum, you should be backing up your website every month. Weekly and even daily backups may be recommended depending on your website and how often updates are being made.
An unexpected security breach, an incompatible plugin update or simply human error, can all cause your website to crash. Small businesses cannot afford any website downtime. It not only looks bad for your brand, but it could potentially lead to lost customers.
WordPress plugins such as UpdraftPlus or Duplicator make backing up your entire WordPress installation very easy. If you don’t use WordPress, most hosting providers have quick and easy ways to back up your entire server on a schedule. Don’t wait until something happens before backing up your website, it should be an automated part of your monthly maintenance.
Important Security Updates
If your website is running on a self-hosted CMS such as WordPress, there will continuously be updates to the software. These updates are meant to patch security vulnerabilities found in the code. WordPress themes and plugins receive updates too, sometimes on a weekly basis. Keeping all your plugins and software versions up-to-date is an important step in keeping your website secure from possible attacks or phishing attempts.
Security plugins can be used to monitor your website 24/7, checking for outdated plugins, scanning for malware and logging suspicious activity. It is strongly recommended you install a security plugin to ensure your website remains secure.
Another part of security is simply removing unused or unnecessary plugins. Stale plugins can hinder website performance and cause unwanted conflicts with the other plugins you are using. A monthly audit of your plugin set up can keep your CMS clean and organized.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Sometimes updating a plugin or theme in WordPress can cause issues with your website. If built properly, there should never be a problem. But occasionally an update changes files that your website depended on and now some functionality or design of your website is broken. In these cases, it’s important to have a web designer/developer available to debug the issue and fix it quickly, or at the very least, roll back to a previous version of your website.
Broken Links
Broken links negatively affect your website in two ways. First, if a user is trying to find information about you and ends up on a 404 page (a page that cannot be found), they may leave your site. It’s a bad user experience that can slowly chip away the trust your customers have in your brand. Secondly, broken links can signal to search engines that your website is poorly maintained, leading to negative signals and possibly a dip in your organic search rankings.
There are many free and paid plugins for WordPress that scan your site for broken links and report them so they can be fixed. Screamingfrog is a great tool for crawling your site and checking for broken links, SEO meta data, security issues and other errors. A monthly check on broken links will help prevent them from getting out of hand.
Content Updates
Google and other search engines like to see fresh new content on your website. Stale content that is not getting much traffic should be removed or updated to provide better value to those looking for that information. This can improve your organic search rankings. Using analytic tools such as Google Analytics to track the performance of your content each month can provide valuable insight into what content is doing well and what pages are in need of updating. These insights will help you decide what new content you should add.
Whether it’s a new blog article, adding new employees to your About Us page, or improving the amount and quality of content on your existing pages, consistently updating and adding content to your website will create positive signals to the search engines and provide continuous value to your customers.