Its sometimes easy to neglect your website, most businesses struggle to find time to update their website and keep on top of the many website maintenance tasks that come along with having an online presence. If you do not have website maintenance services in place or an in house team to maintain your website general tasks can sometimes pile up.
It is important to note that potential new customers or visitors to your website will expect an up to date website. This gives creditability to your business and instils confidence to visitors. If they see broken themes or a blog post that was posted 2 years ago they are going to disappear!
We have put together our top 5 website maintenance tips and things to consider that will help you to keep on top of most important tasks for ensuring your website is up, running and updated!
Will you maintain the website or will you delegate this to an in house team member or website maintenance service company? Planning and reporting updates are just as important and the maintenance itself so you are able to measure the success of your updates and document any findings.
Problems can appear at any time, automated updates or processes on your website server can affect your website.
When managing your own server, it is important to monitor this at all times, keeping in mind that any automatic updates could affect important aspects of your website including:
• Loading speeds
• Functions working
• Broken links/pages
• Images not displaying properly
When researching hosting packages be sure to ask how many websites the company host and what offers they currently have available on upgrades to speeds, server hardware and bandwidth. Asking these questions will ensure that they can handle the data transfers to your website.
As you will visit your website regularly it can be difficult to spot any minor issues that can affect the user’s experience when visiting your website.
In this case our advice would be to pretend to be them, go through the process of searching for your website as the user would. Use some key terms and search on Google to find your website and go through the motions of clicking through the different pages.
This way you will spot any issues such as slow loading, broken links, mistakes within the content etc.
This is also the ideal time to review the design of the website and how simple it is in terms of user experience and providing the user with all the information they require. If you are updating your own website, you can make small tweaks and changes and see what features/layout styles work best and produce a high conversion rate.
Perhaps one of the most important aspects of website maintenance is making sure that your content is up to date and provides the user with relevant information.
It is quite common to put your business’ website live and fall into the habit of never reviewing or refreshing its content until it is time to re-design and modernise it!
For some industries it is important to update the content as rules and regulations change and as a result your services will be affected.
Your customers want to feel confident that you are going to be there for them and believe it or not updating your blog and website content will give them this security.
Search engines also love content creation and by updating your site regularly with search engine optimised content will help to boost your rankings, but that’s just a side note…
We know, it may sound like a big hassle to make changes to your website however making small tweaks and changes can have a big effect!
The main thing to consider with the design of your website is: does my website drive users to buy from my company?
If the answer is no, why? Could it be that there are limited calls-to-action on the website and as a result users are left having to search for a contact form to leave their details on?
Adding an extra contact form here and a CTA button there can make a huge difference to the number of leads that it generates for your business. Find what works best, try a few different options and see what features work well where on your site.
We offer a range of digital marketing services including website maintenance packages, all tailored to your individual needs and requirements based on the number of pages your website has and the number of visitors you receive each month.
If you would like some more information on the services we offer contact us and a member of our team will be more than happy to help.
Our professional team are ready and waiting to hear from you. We provide no-obligation quotes, so there is no pressure when speaking to our team.
Simply fill in our contact form and we will be in touch as soon as possible!