Ready to tackle your monthly website maintenance like an industry pro? Stay ahead of the game by proactively addressing potential problems before they escalate. Keeping your website updated and secure is vital to provide a seamless user experience for your visitors. By following these tasks at least once a month, you’ll keep your site performing at its best. Let’s go!
Table of Contents
1. Review your site’s content, ensuring everything reflects your business, offerings, and brand identity accurately. Plan to add fresh, valuable content at least every 1-2 weeks.
Reviewing your site’s content for accuracy and adding new content on a regular basis is imperative, not only for SEO, but for keeping your target audience engaged and maintain a professional, trustworthy image. Whether it’s blog posts, adding new products or services, or providing updates on events or promotions, the key is to provide fresh, relevant, and valuable information to your audience. We recommend getting into a weekly cadence and reviewing performance every month.
2. Update your platform, plugins, builders, and themes, then review your website for any errors to be corrected. Review and update security measures, including backups and SSL certificates.
Keeping your site’s platform, plugins, builders, and themes up to date and reviewingsecurity measures is a lot like an oil change and tune-up for your car. Making theseupdates at least monthly and reviewing your site for any clean up needed can helpprevent any problems before they become a bigger issue. These updates can addresssecurity threats and leverage third-party updates, resulting in better performance andimproved compatibility with each integration. This can in turn result in better functionality,improved SEO and enhanced user experience.
3. Review your website’s performance, analytics and heatmaps. Create a plan of action to develop and implement any resulting UX improvements.
Data simply is not helpful if it’s not reviewed or acted upon. Every month, review your site’s performance as it relates to the KPIs you are tracking. Based on your results, narrow down your key takeaways and address them. Also, it can be incredibly valuable to review at any heatmaps from the past 30 days and plan out a strategy to address any patterns you see that may be helping or hurting your conversion rate.
4. Test all your web forms on desktop and mobile, test their alerts, and ensure their integrations with your CRM/database (and attributions) are functioning and recording properly.
Web forms are often the most crucial part of a website, and if they are not functioning properly (on both desktop and mobile devices), it can negatively impact your audience’s experience, leading to frustration or confusion. It can also result in losing potential business. Make sure at least monthly that nothing has changed and that leads continue to be properly captured and attributed.
5. Evaluate website speed and make improvements as needed to ensure a fast loading time.
A fast, optimized WordPress site leads to happier visitors, more time spent on your site, more conversions, and ultimately more revenue. There are many things you can do to improve your site speed, including Server Load Reduction, Plugin Optimization, Caching, Styles, and Scripts Optimization, Image Optimization and Compression. Don’t forget optimizing for your mobile users as well.
6. Check for broken links and errors.
Updates to content, URLs, updates and upgrades, and just plain ol’ human error can lead to broken links and errors on your site. It’s a normal thing, which is why it’s important to review your entire site at least once a month to remedy them. Regularly checking your website for broken links and errors helps ensure that your website is functioning properly, that it’s providing a positive user experience, and that it’s maintaining your brand’s credibility and accuracy of information.
7. Double check mobile responsiveness across devices.
As more and more users shift to their devices for making purchasing decisions, it’s incredibly important to make sure your site is mobile optimized – and to review it monthly to make sure nothing has changed as new content was added and updates were made. It’s easy forget about mobile optimization and responsiveness in your monthly checkups, but it’s one of the most important ways to ensure your users are having a positive experience on your site.
While these are our top 7, web maintenance can be a big undertaking and this list is just the beginning. At Storm Brain, we regularly see our businesses leaving money on the table by missing some of these crucial steps, due to time and capacity limitations.
Learn more about our ongoing monthly Website Maintenance and Support Services by setting up a free consultation at stormbrain.com.
