The Website Maintenance Checklist Every Business Needs (Including Yours!)

Your website is finished – you have the flow, design, and development all done and that’s great! But a complete website doesn’t mean you can stop all your efforts as the hard work doesn’t stop there. In fact, it keeps going. In order to keep your website running both effectively and efficiently, you have to complete a series of tasks on a monthly basis (or bi-weekly if you really feel like kicking your competition to the curb). These routine set of tasks you need to do aren’t actually difficult, but does take some commitment, dedication, and time to make sure they happen. When you have all of these tasks happening cohesively together on a set schedule, you’ve got a killer website that’s going to soar.

1. Optimize Your Content for Search Engine Optimization

I hate to break it to you, but SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is not a one-time thing. It’s continuously ongoing. If and once you completely stop your SEO efforts, you’ll notice a decrease (most likely a slight one, but a major one if you’re unlucky) in views and visits – which is something you definitely don’t want.

If you want to keep your page ranking at the top of the Google Search, you’re going to have to expend a lot of effort and continuously update your content and keywords to stay up to date with what your potential customers are searching for. Hiring a professional for recurrent SEO maintenance is definitely going to be a little bit pricey, but the results are going to be worth it – especially if your website ranks on the first search results page of Google (or even better, ranks first at the top!) Hands down, the benefits of SEO are going to outweigh the costs of it.

2. Check for Any Broken Links and Pages

One of the worst things that can happen to a potential customer is stumbling upon a broken link (or even worse, an entire page on your website) and seeing the 404 error. Complete ouch.

Unfortunately, webpages can sometimes crash or link to a no longer active page. When things like these happen, you need to be proactive and make sure you find them before your customers do. We know, we know, clicking on each link is very time-consuming and tedious. But don’t worry, we have a free tool that’s going to simplify your life. By being proactive, you can mitigate the issue and save face from a negative impression of your website. You’re welcome.

3. Check and Optimize Your Loading Speed

It’s a fact, we all know it – people are impatient creatures and aren’t willing to wait for a website to load for more than two seconds (five seconds maximum if you’re lucky). If you have a slow loading webpage, chances are, your visitors are going to click out and go to one of your competitors with faster loading speeds. Even if your business is better suited for them, they won’t even stay to know.

But here’s the good news! You can avert this issue by optimizing your loading speed. Search for any images, documents, hosts, files, or pages that are slowing down your speed and once you’ve found them, make the necessary changes or adjustments to maximize your speed and get your website back to the speed racer that it is. You’ll want the help of a professional with this if you’re not familiar with the technical aspects of it.

4. Check Your Security Features

Having a secure website is incredibly important for your business. Not only is having an insecure website bad for your business’ security measures, but it’s also bad for your visitors as they’ll see your website as illegitimate (or even sketchy! 😳) and won’t want to click on it. If that happens, that’s going to be a big ouch for business.

The SSL certificate is literally critical for your business (I can’t stress this enough!) It keeps your website safe from hackers and also tells your visitors that the page is safe and secure. Whenever your website is insecure, it and its data are exposed to hackers and anyone could (literally) destroy it – which you definitely don’t want.

5. Update Your Information

If a potential customer contacts you through email or phone and they find out it’s been redirected to a different address or just bounced back entirely, you might have immediately lost their interest. What are the chances they are going to go through the effort of finding your correct information? Slim to none, so you know you’ve just lost them.

Your business isn’t a constant, so things are bound to change. One of the things you need to do is make sure that you sift and check through your information, content, and data to warrant that everything is up to date. If you’ve moved business addresses, have new hours, or offer new products, make sure that all of these are updated on your website.

If your social media handles have changed, make sure they’re updated too! Maintaining minor things like this are critical to the overall success of your business.

6. Backup Your Website

Backing up your website is a precautionary call that’s going to save the day for you if anything ever happens to your website. Every time you do some major (or even minor, just to be safe) changes with your website, it’s best to back it up so that you have a copy of it.

If anything compromises your website’s security, you can rest assured that you’ll have a backup copy of it so that you won’t have to start a brand new website from scratch. Phew!

While completing all of these tasks on a monthly (or bi-weekly) basis may seem tedious, time-consuming, and tiring, it’s definitely necessary if you want your business to excel. Now all that’s left is to start checking off the boxes as you go every month – you’re on your way to a killer constant website that’s going to knock your competition off the charts!