Maintaining Your Website
Owning a website could be new to you, but to make a website function the way you want it to, website maintenance is mandatory.
First of all, let me tell you why maintaining your website is important. Over time, as you change your website, some links or some images may stop working as you intended and this could make visitors displeased with your website. Visitors will also be displeased if your website doesn’t have any new features as it can become quite boring for people. One major reason why it’s important to maintain your website is because of potential hackers that could steal information from your website and just make it unusable.
Your website will have to be updated with new features and new products from your company, if the website is not updated then it could lead to some confusion with the customers if there is a product on the website that is no longer being sold. You should also maintain the information about your company with new staff, new phone numbers and also some news about your company whether it’s that you were reviewed or that you were published in a magazine or newspaper. New images are also a good thing to update on your website because this shows the visitors different aspects of your company that might not be expressed using text.
There could be certain features that weren’t added when your website first launched, website maintenance is key if you want to be able to go back and add these features to your website, customers could also have different requests such as fixing a link or changing some text colour to make it more vibrant. Visitors feedback is essential in making your website successful. Make sure that your website also has a “Contact us” page with phone numbers, email addresses and social media links (if you have them).
There are certain aspects of website maintenance that should be covered frequently such as:
- Backing up your website, this is important so that you don’t lose information that you spent hours adding to your website.
- Website outages, you want to be the first person to know if your website has gone down so you can fix it ASAP
- Making sure your domain registration is updated, this would stop you from getting emails about the status of your website.
- Making sure your website isn’t slow to browse.
- Checking all links are working.
- Software updates, there could be certain security updates that would need to implemented.
- Analysing your website stats to see if you are attracting more customers
- Checking your website traffic, this allows you to see what is bringing more customers to your website and where they are from. This would allow you to work on this and use more of the same methods.
