You manage your own website, and you are wondering what are the most important things to do to keep your website up to date for your customers. So here are our top 10 website maintenance tips!
Top 10 website maintenance tips
- Keep your CMS up-to-date. Whatever content management system you use, keep it up to date. Allot of businesses choose WordPress as their go to CMS, because it’s so simple, and then forget to keep it up to date. The latest updates are for performance, new features, security, and much more. It takes 60 seconds or less and is as simple as pushing the update button.
- Keep plugins updated. Plugins in WordPress are tools you can download for free or purchase to get new functionality fast for your website. For example, tools like ninja forms allows a WordPress administrator to create a contact form in minutes. Like WordPress, plugin developers are constantly making updates to the plugins they provide, and it’s in your best interest to keep j them updated. Go to the plugins section of WordPress and click on the update all button.
- Review events and calendars. If your website has a public calendar or events page, review it monthly to make sure it isn’t outdated. It only takes a minute to check, and nothing days bad business to your customers like events from 2020 front and center on your home page.
- Review for seasonality. Many businesses provide different services, change hours of operations, or have season specific content on their website. Like with events, just look over your website once a month to check for outdated pictures, text, and other content that might not resonate with your guests at that particular time of year.
- Check your secure protocol. For your website to be secure, you need to have “https://“ at the beginning of your domain name. If your site starts with “http://“, and doesn’t have the “s”, your site is not secure. That means your customers will get a notice when they visit your website saying it’s not secure, and likely won’t make a purchase. It’s a great way to lose credibility before your customer even starts shopping. Contact us if you need help fixing it. It’s a bit too complicated to cover it here in greater detail. Also note, your secure status can change as SSL certificates have expiration dates. It’s not something you want to forget about.
- Check for invalid login attempts. Use a plugin like limit login attempts to log and stop the wrong person from logging on to your site as an administrator. The limit login tool shows you a log of all attempts, whether they were successful or not, and what user name they tried. Then you can add the invalid username to the deny list so they can’t keep trying to figure out a password that works. We’ll cover securing your site in another blog post. For now, just watch for bad logging and stop them in their tracks.
- Do one On-page SEO change a month, or more if you have time. Use a keyword research tool like Yoast or Rankmath to assess your site and make positive changes. It could be as simple as changing a page title to something more SEO friendly.
- Review comments. If you have a blog or pages with comments turned on, you should review and respond to comments as frequently as possible. You will get a ton of spam, so use your discussion settings to block inappropriate words and spam related content. We typically have comments fully moderated so we can control what and when comments are shown on our pages.
- Review your links. A good site has many links to other websites. Review them to make sure they still point to an actual page. You don’t want your customers clicking a link only to get a 404 error.
- Review Google site kit. If you don’t have this plugin installed, get it. You need to be tracking your impressions, clicks, CTR, search console keywords and much more, regularly. Site kit helps you do this. We’ll post more content specific to this plugin sometime in the future.
We hope these top 10 website maintenance tips are helpful to you. There are many other things you could be doing every month, but you probably don’t have that kind of time. At 120 web design, we do! And we provide unbelievable service along the way. If you are interested in getting some of your time back, contact us or give us a call! We’d love to help your website stay fresh, secure, and relevant to your audience!