If you are an entrepreneur, it would be safe for us to assume that you have a website to market your business online. After all, a website is an essential tool today for business growth as it defines your corporate identity in the digital world and lets users learn about your brand and how to reach you. That improves your prospects of capturing more leads and driving sales and revenue.
With that said, putting up a website and keeping it operational are two separate things. Just because your website exists and shows up in search results does not mean that your job is over. That is just the beginning. You must focus on maintaining your site regularly to ensure that it remains secured and visitors do not experience any annoying glitches or sluggish performance. An unresponsive or outdated website can be disastrous to your business as it is a surefire way of losing customers.
Here is a list of some vital routine maintenance checks that you need to perform to ensure that your business website works flawlessly without any troubles.
Keep It Updated
An essential website maintenance habit you must develop is to keep it up to date by installing new updates now and then. Whether you use WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, or any other Content Management System (CMS), you must update it constantly to keep your online storefront functioning perfectly and protect it against any security threats. Avoiding regular software updates leaves your site vulnerable to cyber attacks, which can be disastrous for your business.
Besides, keep your plugins updated too. Outdated plugins can make your website buggy, affecting the usability of the site and leading to a frustrating user experience. Long story short, always keep your website, plugins, and themes updated to the latest versions to mitigate security risks and provide an optimal user experience.
Create Backups
An easily overlooked aspect of a smoothly functioning business website is creating backs up every month. It is an essential element of website maintenance and should be high on your list of priorities. Regularly backing up your site would ensure that you do not lose out on anything if your site breaks down due to any updates or system failures.
Backups are also crucial from a safety and security perspective. They will store your content and other sensitive data safely and securely in the event your website gets hacked. As mentioned by a WordPress website maintenance company, it will enable you to restore your website using the offsite backups and rebuild it from where you left instead of scrambling to fix it from scratch. That would help avoid any downtime that could cause the loss of valuable potential customers.
Test It In Different Browsers
It is essential to check your website’s performance across multiple browsers to ensure a smooth online customer journey regardless of which browser they are surfing. We recommend that you test your website on the most popular ones- Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, and Internet Explorer.
Check the compatibility on each by observing if the layout and display fit perfectly, how long it takes to load pages, or any other features that may behave differently on a particular browser. You may utilize various online tools like Browsershots that allow you to test your website’s compatibility with different browsers.
Fix Broken Links
Broken links are links that lead the user to pages that do not exist. Finding and fixing broken links should be part of your business website’s regular maintenance. Broken links and 404 error web pages not only ruin the user’s experience and cause them to stop browsing any further but also damage your site’s credibility and professional outlook resulting in lower search engine rankings.
That makes it imperative that you monitor your web pages regularly to check for any dead links. Google Webmaster Tools is a valuable resource to detect and remove invalid URLs and detect other technical errors on your website. They help keep your website running at optimal performance, so if you have not registered your website there yet, do so immediately.
It is easy to set up a website and forget about maintaining it until something unfortunate happens. Neglecting your site’s maintenance may impact its functionality and leave it vulnerable to cyber attacks, which can be detrimental to your business.
The good news is that you do not have to be a technical wizard to keep your website up and running. Performing some simple routine maintenance checks will ensure that your website runs smoothly and renders a delightful user experience.