8 Essential Website Maintenance Tasks
Routine website maintenance is essential for making sure your website is up to date and functioning properly. Unfortunately, website maintenance is something that often gets overlooked, and as a result, companies aren’t getting everything they should be out of their website. Here are 8 essential website maintenance tasks you should perform on a regular basis.
1. Test your forms—Contact forms have a nasty tendency to suddenly stop working. That’s why it’s important that you test them out as often as possible. If you notice a sudden drop in email list subscribers or other conversions, immediately test out all contact forms to ensure they’re working as they should.
2. Check all links—Check out all of your navigation links as well as internal links throughout the body of your website copy and blog posts. This will help to make certain your visitors are able to go down the path through your website that you want them to travel.
3. Ensure contact info is up to date—Over time, phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses might change. Visit your contact page to double check that all info is accurate.
4. Make certain the search function works—Today’s internet users are in a hurry. That’s why many people immediately use a website’s search function as soon as they land on the page. This allows them to find the info they’re looking for as quickly as possible. Use your website’s search function just as a normal visitor would to make sure it works properly.
5. Update your copyright—Your copyright should technically be updated any time new content is added to your website. Beyond protecting your content, updating your copyright lets your visitors know that your website is current and active.
6. Keep product descriptions and prices accurate—Have you changed your products or services in any way? Have your prices been altered? If so, update your website to reflect these changes.
7. Test your checkout process—The worst possible scenario is for a visitor on your website to decide to become a customer only to be denied by a shopping cart that doesn’t work. Check your shopping cart and overall checkout process regularly to make certain your customers are able to get in and out quickly.
8. Check your search engine rankings—It’s a good idea to check your website’s search rankings at least once a month. Don’t panic over tiny month-to-month fluctuations, but be on the lookout for developing trends. The sooner you can act on drops in search rankings, the less damaging they will be.
Would you add any tasks to this list? Share your thoughts in the replies.
December 3rd, 2009 at 8:58 am
All great tips. It can really turn of prospects if some of these things aren't working on your website.
Regarding #2. Checking over all links regularly can really be a pain. Fortunately there's a great plugin broken link checker that makes checking over all links a breeze!
December 4th, 2009 at 9:25 am
I would just like to add something…
we must not forget also to keep an eye on meta-tags, alt tags, as part of website maintenance – do some edits if necessary to keep it up to date. This will help websites to become more search engine friendly.
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August 16th, 2010 at 11:20 pm
Nice read but what about the facts
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