If you just created your website or are planning to create one, you need a website maintenance checklist. It will help you keep the site running 24/7 without experiencing major problems.
The checklist will also help you address issues that arise fast to prevent your site from breaking down and disappointing your customers.
We’ve prepared the complete website maintenance checklist to make your life easier. Here’s everything you need to perform and the right time to do it.
Benefits of Website Maintenance
Every responsible driver knows their car needs regular service. Service enables you to maintain your car in good condition and ensure it is functioning at optimum levels.
Your business website is similar to the machine running a car: it requires regular maintenance to function at optimum levels. In addition, here are more reasons to maintain your website regularly:
Improve customer satisfaction - a well-maintained website will load faster, be highly responsive, and has relevant content for your customers.
Boost your SEO – maintaining your website ensures that it remains optimized. Such optimization will improve your search engine ranking on Google.
Increased security – securing your site will reduce downtimes and protect customer information, especially on an e-commerce site.
Weekly Website Maintenance Tasks
Lao Tzu once said, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." To maintain your website, you’ll begin with the simple weekly maintenance tasks mentioned below.
Review our Metrics
Develop a weekly routine of measuring key metrics such as the number of visitors and most visited pages. You should be able to do this with the help of Google Analytics easily.
Scan for Malware
Unfortunately, you can never predict when malware may attack your site. Therefore, a weekly scan of your website should help you be on the safe side.
Update Plugins and Themes
Plugins and themes may affect the loading speed of your website. Therefore, it is best to update them to the latest versions. Including an auto-update feature saves you the effort of manually updating each tool. It is also ideal for improving your site's security.
Monthly Website Maintenance Tasks
Monthly maintenance of your site helps you improve its performance and allow you to stay ahead of your competitors. The following checklist will help you with your monthly website maintenance:
Review Your Website Performance
Do you know how you take your car to the mechanic who then begins by examining your car to identify areas that require fixing? It's also a good practice to begin your website maintenance by reviewing its performance.
Luckily, you don't need to wear your apron or overall to examine your website. Automation tools like Google Analytics offer relevant insights into your website's performance.
Focus on analyzing the following key performance metrics:
Unusually high bounce rates on your site
A decline in lead conversion rates
Website traffic patterns
Website content SEO ranking
Reviewing these performance metrics will give you an idea of the issues that require immediate attention. For example, you can pinpoint the content that’s not helping you convert leads and find ways of improving it.
Test Your Website Forms
Your website is useful for achieving lead generation and nurturing goals. Therefore, ensure you create web forms to collect leads, email addresses, payments, and for customer inquiries.
For your monthly maintenance practices, examine each of these forms. Find out whether your internal processes work harmoniously with the forms. For example, are your internal processes responding to customer inquiries?
Also, test the forms based on user experience. For example, are the customers taking longer than usual to complete the forms? For lead generation forms, examine whether the new customers can access the gift promised after filling out the form.
Finally, fix any issues the forms may have when loading on mobile devices. The forms must be responsive to minimize customers' time to fill them.
Test and Improve Your Website Speeds and Make Necessary Improvements
You can use several automation tools to test your website's speed, such as PageSpeed Insights by Google. Such tools offer insights into your site's speed on various devices, browsers, and network types.
These tools also provide suggestions for improving your website's speed. Therefore, implement the suggested solutions to improve the user experience.
Check for any Website Updates
Your website contains plugins, scripts, and other tools that influence its performance. The developers of these tools update them regularly to improve their efficiency and patch any vulnerabilities.
In some cases, like when using WordPress, automatically updating these plugins may cause compatibility issues. Therefore, update these tools monthly when you are available to correct any compatibility issues that may arise.
Note: These updates are necessary to improve the security of your website. Therefore, do not ignore them as they’ll boost your site’s efficiency.
Backup Your Site
Imagine one day waking up to a website that has collapsed with no way to retrieve your data. That would be a waste of your time and energy, and it’d take you back several months or years. This is the reason it’s advisable to have a backup system for your website. Create a monthly schedule for updating your site so you can always have all your data stored somewhere else.
Quarterly Website Maintenance Tasks
One of the best business practices is creating quarterly financial statements to measure the organization's progress in achieving its financial goals. The same best practice can be applied to your website maintenance. Here’s what you need to include in your quarterly website checklist.
Analyze the Website for Possible Improvements
You may have noticed a pattern with these website checklists. The first step at each stage is reviewing your website to view its current situation. It is always best to start by understanding all the variables at play. And you can only do this by first reviewing your website.
For your quarterly reviews, the focus should be on the following aspects:
Confirm your popups are functioning effectively
Find room for content enhancements
Your page formats
Position and design your CTA button
Your website design style
Your choice of site graphics and visuals.
Password Authentication
You never want to get too comfortable with your website's password. You risk dropping your guard and making your website vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Decrease your vulnerability by changing your website passwords quarterly. It’ll help you avoid any possible unauthorized access and blocks out any other person who may have gained access.
One of the best password practices is to ensure that you have two-factor authentication for your passwords. Also, keep your website's passwords a secret; do not share them with anyone.
Check and Fix Broken Links
Broken links on your website will affect your SEO efforts. The broken links are also a disaster for your website's user experience. They’ll directly impact your site's traffic and conversion abilities.
You may choose to fix your site’s broken link manually. However, this will only waste your time and effort. The best alternative is to use tools like Google Search Console or Semrush that will help you scan for broken links on your site. Once identified, use these automated tools to fix these broken links.
Assess Your Website Plugins and Themes
Plugins and themes help you create and maintain your preferred website design. However, these tools are constantly being developed and updated; hence you may be tempted to upgrade or acquire the latest versions.
It would help if you uninstalled the plugins and themes you no longer use. Otherwise, hackers may use them as potential loopholes to hack your site. Also, holding too many of these plugins and themes will only slow your website.
Test Your Website's Purchasing Function
The checkout process is a vital component of your e-commerce site. It influences the security and effectiveness of your customers' payment process. A constantly failing checkout process may discourage your customers from buying from your business.
Therefore, you must review this process to ensure customers are not experiencing glitches. Access the checkout process by making test purchases on your website's e-commerce site. That way, you can identify and fix snags in the process ASAP.
Annual Website Maintenance Tasks
You have worked to maintain your website in good shape. It is now time to get it over the finish with the following annual maintenance activities.
Conduct Your Annual Usability Testing
Usability testing helps you determine the level of your website's intuitiveness. It enables you to determine how users interact with your website. In particular, you will want to know whether the users love your website design, colors, language, and visuals.
All these aspects will influence how long users spend on your website and the probability of the user visiting again. Usability testing offers insights into aspects you need to improve your website to improve the customer experience.
Check Your Domain and Hosting Renewals
Your website almost ceases to exist when you fail to renew your domain name before it expires. In reality, your website cannot exist without a domain name. Similarly, your website requires a host for it to exist. Therefore, mark both on your calendar and renew before their expiry date.
The good news is that you can activate the auto-renew feature on both of their subscription. However, ensure the payment card attached to the auto-renewal is valid and has the necessary funds.
Perform a Content Audit
Your annual website review should involve an assessment of your SEO content. It is an opportunity to evaluate the success of your content strategy.
The KPIs you set when developing the strategy will help you determine whether the strategy is a good fit for your business goals. The assessment should also include the strategy's effectiveness in improving the lead conversion rate.
The result should give you a clear idea of the strategies you need to modify, improve or abandon entirely.
Feeling Overwhelmed by Your Website Maintenance Checklist Already?
As you’ve seen above, maintaining your website is no easy task and requires high technical knowledge. As a busy entrepreneur who has no time to learn all the technical issues, a smarter alternative would be to entrust the website maintenance tasks to experts like us. Review our support tiers now and choose a package that suits you.