Basic Website Maintenance Checklist

As one the leading website maintenance company, we have created a professional checklist of tasks to be done on a regular time interval to make the website work properly and optimally. Building a website for a business is important but maintaining it is far more important than that. When you build a website and leave it idle it loses interest among even the regular users. It is necessary to do maintenance of the website you built as often as you can.
There are few important steps in maintaining the websites irrespective of what they are about. Here we have compiled a set of steps crucial in maintaining a website.

1. User testing – testing whether your website is up to date and for user friendliness.
2. Check the user compatibility and speed.
3. Website security- checking if your website is free of hacking.
4. Regular backup- regular backup is needed for your website to secure the data.
5. Test your forms and make test purchases.
6. Fix the broken links if present.
7. Keeping the website interesting for the users by providing new information.

1. User testing
The type and definition of a website has changed from time to time, it is necessary to keep up to the changing user’s taste. An ideal website design from the early 90’s would be totally different from what it is today.
It is very important for the website to be innovative and attractive for the users to browse through and visit the site again and again. The website can be revamped once in three or four years for it to keep up with the users changing taste.

2. Check the user compatibility and speed
Testing for the user compatibility is one of the crucial steps involved in website maintenance so the customers can enjoy the full potential of the website. The website should be compatible with all versions of every browser for the user to access the website from multiple devices.
If it is an e-commerce website then test purchases should be made to check the compatibility of the website in different devices. Speed of the website should also be checked from time to time so the customers wouldn’t have to take a long time to finish their work.

3. Website security
Hacking is a major problem in maintaining a website, if you don’t check for the hacks often it could lead to piracy of data or you may even lose your critical information from your website. Securing the website from malfunction should be your priority. Sometimes you may not even realise that your website has been hacked so it is important to keep check of your website for hackers.
You must also check if all your plugins, scripts and platforms are up to date. If yours is an e-commerce website then you must be extra careful about the security or you will be putting your customer’s information in jeopardy. This may not look good from the customer side and you may lose face with them. Security check should be done once every month.

4. Regular backup
Any kind of data needs a backup for the continuity of work without any hindrance. Even when we type a small document we would have experienced something like a power cut and would have lost all the data. When it’s a website involved it could be very tedious and waste a lot of time to work the data from the start.
As mentioned earlier a hacker could hack into your website and may delete all the data this could lead to a lot of confusion and also be an unnecessary waste of time, money and resources. Back should be done at least once a month to keep your data safe.

5. Test your forms and make test purchases
Testing the user forms and client forms must be done at least two to three times a year. This is to ensure your forms are working properly without any difficulty for the user. If the forms are not working properly then it should be tended to as soon as possible to not lose the clients unnecessarily.
If it is an e-commerce website then test purchases should be made by ordering something from the website to check the smooth functioning of the website and the process. If there’s anything wrong with the process then it should be rectified.This can be done once every three months to ensure user friendliness of the website.

6. Fix broken links
Fixing broken links is always important to not annoy the users. Some links may have worked while you created the website but may have stopped working later on these are the dead links. The dead links should be checked for and removed otherwise the user may lose interest in your website.
When the user clicks on a link and it takes them to a dead link the user may be disappointed . If there are too many links that lead to error 404 page then the user may get irritated and move on to other websites.There are a lot of tools to find out the broken links, for example the google search console which can be used to find the broken links.

7. Keeping the website interesting for the users by providing new information
Adding new content to the website is necessary to keep the website interesting for regular users. Provide the customers with new and exciting content for them to revisit the website often. Publish more blogs and SEO content so that your website would be in top searches.
Keep check of the google analytics which provides you with the information of how people are finding your website. You can introduce some changes and see how they change the visibility of your website. If a particular step improved your visibility then you can try it more often. If your website is new then your website tends to have less visibility but gradually it may improve if you keep posting relevant content.

If you follow all the above mentioned steps in your website maintenance process achieve an increase in traffic of your website over time. Don’t try to skip any of these processes to get good response from the users.

However, if you ever feel to have your website taken care of professionally then you can have a look at our website maintenance packages india.